Last Friday marked the fifth year that Juneteenth has been observed as a federal holiday in the United States. In the summer of 2020, one year before President Biden signed the Juneteenth National Independence Act into law, Darryl Pinckney went looking for mention of the holiday in the historical record and his personal life. His search brought him to a silent film shot in Oklahoma City in 1925; Ralph Ellison’s second novel, Juneteenth; and, finally, the window of his home in Harlem, watching a Juneteenth celebration during the summer that “young America blew the lid off lockdown.”
‘We Must Act Out Our Freedom’
Darryl Pinckney
I will look for you in the stories of new kings. Juneteenth isn’t mentioned in the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois or Carter Woodson, the founder of The Journal of Negro History. I haven’t yet come across a description of the first Juneteenth celebrations equivalent to Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s report of the ceremonies for the Emancipation Proclamation as it was read aloud on Port Royal Island, South Carolina, on New Year’s Day, 1863. Black troops, white commanders, white clergymen, white women schoolteachers, black women schoolteachers, and the formerly enslaved turned resisters gathered at the sober campground to ratify in their hearts the next covenant of the Republic.
Various sources tell us that when news of Lee’s surrender in Virginia reached the West a few weeks later, the Confederate army in Texas began to fall apart. Even so, federal authority depended on the presence of Union troops. In his memoirs, Ulysses S. Grant remembers that General Gordon Granger charged with “such a roar of musketry” at the Battle of Chattanooga that the rebels heard him from a long way off and had time to get away. When Grant learned that Granger had turned up in New Orleans, the War Department ignored his advice that the general not be given another command. Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865, to announce and enforce the Emancipation Proclamation. Texas was the last Confederate state to be occupied.
Surprise is an essential element of beauty, the poets say, and several arresting minutes of silent film shot by Reverend S.S. Jones in Oklahoma City in 1925 have been making the Internet rounds of late. His stationary camera captures a Juneteenth parade, a bold march of heartbreakingly well-dressed black people—marching bands, Pullman porters, black women’s clubs under large black umbrellas, and black veterans of both World War I and the Spanish-American War. They are moving through a residential neighborhood where we see scarcely any spectators, as if everyone who lived on that tidy street were in the parade. Juneteenth was a black holiday out West, not down South, I assumed, and therefore not a memory that traveled with black people in their migrations to the cities of the Northeast and Midwest in the first half of the twentieth century. Observance of Juneteenth supposedly fell off over time. It was revived nationally in the Black Expo days of the 1970s, when Kwanzaa was first catching on as the Africanist Christmas.
I’d not heard of Juneteenth until Ralph Ellison’s long-awaited second novel was published posthumously in 1999.* Juneteenth is mostly voice, or voices, “in the beloved idiom,” as Ellison said. It centers on the confrontation between a white senator and the black preacher who taught him when still a boy how to hold a crowd. The Ellisonian twist is that the racist senator may have been a white boy who’d been brought up as a black boy. The novel opens in the 1950s and flashes back to the senator’s childhood with the preacher on the black revival circuit in the South before World War I and his escape across the color line as a roving white filmmaker in the Southwest sometime in the 1920s. Ellison’s rhetorical invention reaches its climax as the senator and preacher remember, separately and together, a Juneteenth celebration on a hot, dusty night in a tent in rural Alabama, not out West.
Old-fashioned Negroes getting Emancipation mixed up with the Resurrection and vaudeville, the senator thinks at first. The preacher remembers the workers in white uniforms, barrels of ice, yellow cases of soda pop, the vast quantities of catfish and ham, coleslaw and chocolate cake. At the sunrise services, they were “playing for keeps.” The preacher is dismayed that his former prodigy could have forgotten how they in their sermon invoked the Middle Passage and its images of tongues cut out and talking drums stolen. One group can’t be given license to kill another in order to prove their superiority, he thinks to himself. He carries scars from the fights he got into trying to go to the polls in Oklahoma armed with ax handles and pistols, and accompanied by some Native American and white sympathizers. Ellison has maybe given his preacher a fighting past he wished he’d had himself. But then his preacher suspects that whites were attempting to destroy the humility of black people because they had sensed its life-preserving power, as if Ellison had to reposition him so that his Juneteenth peroration emphasizes how blacks sang and danced, survived and flourished.
Ellison opposed the notion of black life as a “metaphysical condition” of “irremediable agony” because that made it seem as though it either took place in a vacuum or had only one theme. In his writings about the jazz greats he heard play in his youth in Oklahoma, he gives them credit for expressing something about the optimism of blacks as a group that found no definition elsewhere. Ellison recalled with pride his music teacher, who had her students join the Scottish reel competition on May Day, ignoring people who said black students ought not to learn European folk dances. Black people coming from enslaved circumstances couldn’t cling to their cultural idioms and survive, therefore they sought to extend their range, Ellison claimed. Cultural synthesis was important to “the unnoticed logic of the democratic process.” He insisted that segregation had not cut off black people from various fields of influence and that in turn American culture was marked at every point by black vernacular culture. This mixture was an opportunity, as he saw it, a chance to make a humanly richer society.
Ellison, born in 1913, made much of the pioneer spirit shared between black and white, and it mattered to him that Oklahoma had not been a part of the Confederacy. Though blacks by law had the vote, Oklahoma’s state constitution in 1907 forbade integrated schools and classified as “colored” anyone with any degree of black blood, while Native Americans were classed as “white.” Ellison was only eight years old when in 1921 in Tulsa a black youth, Dick Rowland, was arrested for supposedly assaulting a white woman in a downtown elevator. Armed black men protecting the prisoner in the county jail turned back a white mob, after which white people went on a rampage, destroying Greenwood, the thriving black business section, looting, burning black homes, running black people out of town. Seventy black people were killed and nine white people.
In 1930, in Chickasha, Oklahoma, a black youth—Henry Argo—was arrested for the rape of a white girl and the attempted murder of her child. It was rumored that Argo and the girl were lovers. A mob of two thousand white men attacked the jail with battering rams, drove off the National Guard with gunfire, used commandeered National Guard equipment to pull the jail doors off their hinges, smashed a hole through the concrete cell that held Argo, shot him, and stabbed him. He bled to death on his way to a hospital in Oklahoma City.
In her autobiography, A Matter of Black and White (1996), Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher recalls that in her family the story was that the mob came back for Henry Argo only after the sheriff had assured the armed black men guarding the jailhouse that he was no longer in danger. There had been talk of parading his body through the black part of town to teach them a lesson. The town’s one black doctor gathered together bootleggers and gamblers—“this was no job for church folks—and declared that any white man who crossed Minnesota Street with that boy’s body would die in colored town.” Whether the story of black anger was legend or not, Sipuel notes that Argo’s murder was the last recorded lynching in the state.
Sipuel’s parents had moved to Chickasha shortly after the riot in Tulsa, where black men like her father—a Pentecostal minister—who tried to protect black properties got rounded up by white militias. There were no parks or playgrounds for black children in Chickasha when Sipuel was growing up in the 1920s. After she graduated from Langston University in 1945, the only state-supported college open to black students in Oklahoma, Sipuel volunteered to join Thurgood Marshall’s NAACP challenge to the state’s segregation laws by applying to the all-white University of Oklahoma law school—the only public law school in the state. In Sipuel v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma (1948), the Supreme Court agreed with the argument that the state had to provide her with a law education under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Sipuel’s case was a precursor of Brown v. Board of Education.
The weirdness was elsewhere, I was telling myself back in February. My aunt in Massachusetts, a long-retired middle school teacher, was perplexed that her favorite Chinese restaurant was completely deserted, except for us. On my first visit to her little town near Fort Devens, where her husband had been reassigned, her history lesson was about the soldiers who came back to Fort Devens in 1918 with Spanish flu, and it spread from there. Fort Devens is long closed, phantoms snuck through my aunt’s window and replaced the thermostat she loved with an inferior one, and it was a further measure of her dementia that sitting there over egg rolls too rubbery to tear, she had never heard of influenza at Devens. It has been a measure of her dementia in the past few months that her understanding of Covid-19 remains on a par with that of seemingly everyone in the White House.
On March 16, New York City woke to learn that schools, restaurants, theaters, and concert venues would be closed. In the unpredicted schedule of gyms shuttered next and speaker-loaded squad cars roaming my neighborhood to warn people to maintain social distance; in the unprecedented drama of self-isolation and quarantine, followed by lockdown, angry noncompliance among black people was a clue as to how vulnerable we are in the pandemic. My trainer, a young black family man who saved himself from the streets, speculated that Covid was a Chinese invention for the trade war, but it backfired. In the face of mounting evidence about how, in lieu of a vaccine, social behavior mattered in dealing with the virus, my trainer, already streaming workout sessions, was adamant that he was more afraid of the police than he was of the pandemic.
The class character of the pandemic was soon very clear anyway—who worked in what were deemed essential services, who had to show up on those front lines, who had to keep packing and delivering, whom they were going home to, who had poor health in the first place and often inadequate health care. By mid-April in some states, black people made up a much higher percentage of confirmed cases than the percentage of black people in the general population. Black people were 40 percent of Covid sufferers in Michigan, while only 14 percent of the population. “Liberate Michigan,” immortal white people in Lansing chanted against strict lockdown. The pandemic was showing us that most of us had never had merely to survive before.
Empty streets as a shared global experience, cleaner air, surveillance anxiety, loss of livelihood, disturbances in overcrowded prisons, hospital staff martyrs, double bunking in the graveyards, and nightly salutes to workers, soldiers, and volunteers in danger also underscored how small is the man trying to hold our national destiny hostage to his sour vanity. Drink bleach, inject bleach, rise by Easter. If a person cannot imagine a future, then we would say that that person is depressed. But if a country cannot envision a future, how do we describe its condition? My partner said Republican Party policy was simply, “You can go back to work and you can die.”
By May Day, the stay-at-home order in the city was beginning to crumble. Footage would appear on social media of, say, an incident in Brooklyn in which the police had used social distancing guidelines as the reason to get rough with black guys hanging out in groups on sidewalks and between parked cars. They almost followed a script: disperse, why, disperse, no, stand-off, push, push back, take down. Then it happened.
Say his name
George Floyd
The pandemic dramatized what inequality looks like, and the police killing of George Floyd showed everyone what being black in America feels like, over and over again. Young America blew the lid off lockdown, a blast wave of outrage that reached around the world. Jill Nelson told Henry Louis Gates Jr. years ago that she was tired of going to all-black or mostly black demonstrations for social justice, that it was time for white people to show up. They did: their vast numbers are what Occupy Wall Street and Ferguson have led to, in part. Sustained public protest, staying in the streets, those who shall not be moved, taking over the mainstream narrative, if you want to talk that way, the coming together of opposition, if you prefer. Black Lives Matter was ready.
Read the full article for free on the Review’s website here.
Very much appreciated this, part retrospective, part testimony…