Penn Today spoke with Marcia Chatelain of Africana Studies and Kermit Roosevelt of Penn Carey Law about the history of the Emancipation Proclamation and the impact of Juneteenth throughout the American story and today.
A Juneteenth Emancipation Day celebration, June 19, 1900, Texas.
Juneteenth marks the date that Union troops arrived in Galveston, Texas—June 19, 1865—carrying the news of the end of the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation. What began as a regional holiday has since grown to become a national holiday.
Penn Today spoke with Marcia Chatelain, the Presidential Penn Compact Professor of Africana Studies, and Kermit Roosevelt, the David Berger Professor for the Administration of Justice at Penn Carey Law, about the history of the Emancipation Proclamation and the impact of Juneteenth continuing throughout the American story.
What did Juneteenth mean for people at the end of the Civil War and the start of Reconstruction?
Marcia Chatelain: There’s this powerful narrative of Juneteenth as an overnight transformation going from slavery to freedom that is particularly poignant. But then you take a step back and see how long that process actually took place between 1863 and the end of the Civil War. Juneteenth today is key to understanding how emancipation worked. What happened in 1863 didn’t apply to the entire South; it applied to the border states, and there we have an issue where … part of Texas is not subject to emancipation. The Emancipation Proclamation for this part of Texas is a reflection of the convergence of the end of the Civil War and the granting of freedom. It also showcased the actual knowledge that the issue of slavery had been resolved in a meaningful way.
What did the Emancipation Proclamation do and what was its impact?
Kermit Roosevelt: In its final form, it says all people enslaved in certain parts of the country will be free—it doesn’t apply everywhere. But it does say those people shall be forever free. So that shows you that slavery is ending. Even more importantly, it says to the Union military forces, ‘protect these people and accept them into the service of the United States.’ It’s Black military service that gets you to Black citizenship, because military service is a traditional path to citizenship. That means that Black people are going to be included in the American political community. And if they’re going to be included, then you need to protect their rights, and that’s what gets us the Fourteenth Amendment, which is the real transformation of our Constitutional order.
You have made an argument that the Emancipation Proclamation is actually the starting point for the making of a new nation. What do you mean by that?
Roosevelt: We have a sense of our identity as a nation, and it involves a dedication to certain values, and probably equality comes first. We believe that all Americans are equal and deserve to be treated with equal concern and respect. We tend to associate that idea with the Declaration of Independence and the phrase ‘all men are created equal.’ But in 1776, it turns out people didn’t think that was all that important; they didn’t think it was a groundbreaking new idea. Our American ideals actually have their origin in the struggle against slavery, which I think is a good story for us to have as a nation. If you’re looking for a moment that set us on a path to the America that we’ve become, it’s the Emancipation Proclamation.
What was the broader meaning of Juneteenth during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s?
Chatelain: The celebration of Juneteenth was a really slow process. It started as a Texas holiday, a regional holiday, for the majority of its existence. It wasn’t until the 1960s and 1970s that people took it as a general celebration of emancipation and the nuances of freedom. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there were different ways that people would celebrate aspects of African-American history—you see the building of Negro History Week, which became Black History Month, you have the celebration of Lincoln’s birthday, you have the March on Washington celebrating 100 years from the Emancipation Proclamation. And with Juneteenth, it finally comes to a crescendo in 2021, when it becomes a federal holiday.
Marking our values with the Emancipation Proclamation has been described as a more hopeful story of America. How would you characterize it?
Roosevelt: I do think it is more hopeful. The story that we tell ourselves, about our ideals in 1776 and identifying with the patriots of the Revolutionary War, is really tough to get around—the way that slavery was protected by the original Constitution, and gets mentioned in the Declaration of Independence because they’re complaining about slave rebellions. But if you go up to Abraham Lincoln and the abolitionists and the Reconstructionist Congress, then you get a set of people who don’t have that moral flaw. Lincoln has attitudes on race that are not progressive by today’s standards, and are pretty sexist, but they’re actually committed to an idea of equality that’s going to spread. So, I think you can say that we start with this ideal and realize it more fully over time. We’re still working with the seeds that they planted.
What does Juneteenth offer us in terms of an opportunity to tackle the big ideas or big issues of this time?
Chatelain: If we think about the Emancipation Proclamation as the moment of freedom, then go back and think about what that actually meant, it helps us understand the incredible emotional and civil weight that people felt upon hearing this information. I think it humanizes the process of emancipation and how it must have affected the lives and hearts and sensibilities and imagination and brings a human element to this story. That is much more helpful in allowing us to be really reflective about how the ways of slavery and its legacies continue to remain with us.
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