My JUNETEENTH reflections, delivered for @USC’s Juneteenth celebration this morning & to be delivered on the steps of LA City Hall later today:
On Juneteenth, we celebrate the deliverance of black bodies from America’s bondage.
On Juneteenth, we celebrate the deliverance of black bodies from America’s bondage.
When I think of black bodies in bondage, I first think of my own dad, literally & figuratively a big black patriot: a six foot eight-inch barrel-chested black veteran of the 2nd World War & proud Marine who, in the words of America the Beautiful—“more than self his country loved”
This fact baffled me for years. I couldn’t fathom a black man like my dad pledging allegiance to a flag, and the nation for which it stands, after that very same nation showed its gratitude for his military service by falsely incarcerating him for 22 to 55 years in a state pen...
...by falsely incarcerating him for 22 to 55 years in a state penitentiary for alleged possession and sale of marijuana. How, I used to wonder, could he and other black victims of outrageous injustice perjure ourselves again and again with the fiction of nationhood?
He taught himself the law in prison and found the key to his cell in the warden’s own law books, vindicating himself in a case I now teach in my criminal law class called Armour v. Salisbury; yet...
...yet his wrongful conviction robbed our family of its sole breadwinner, abruptly reducing a middle class black family of eight to crumbs and roaches and rats.
I could only attribute his unflagging love for “his” flag, his undying zeal for his own captors and their emblems, to some kind of psychological disability — say, Stockholm syndrome — in which victims sympathetically identify with and even defend and celebrate their abusers.
In time I came to see his patriotic devotion to the American flag not as a mental illness but as a profoundly political act, one intimately wedded to Juneteenth, the occasion for which we are gathered here today.
The Declaration of Independence, adopted on July 4, 1776, declared— “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
These were exhilarating promises & aspirations, but the deeds of the men who wrote and adopted that Declaration did not live up to their lofty language, for many of our nation’s founders bought and sold black bodies like mine on auction blocks in open markets across this country.
The “us” that the American flag originally stood for did not include folk like me, who, according to the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision, “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”
It took 600,000 dead men in a cataclysmic race war to transform the American flag into an emblem that includes black folk in its “us” of American citizens.
The words of the Declaration of Independence became relevant to Juneteenth when, in his Gettysburg Address, President Lincoln thought about the graveyard his country had become, and echoing that foundational Declaration, said:
“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a NEW nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
THAT new nation that Lincoln pointed to is the nation that Juneteenth celebrates.
As Lincoln continued: “Now we are engaged in A GREAT CIVIL WAR, testing whether THAT nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”
Lincoln: “We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that THAT nation might live” [Those who laid down their lives on such battlefields to end black bondage in America showed us all what true allyship looks like]
And then Lincoln uttered these words that have burning relevance for this special occasion and for the generational upheaval we’ve witnessed in the streets over the past two weeks:
“It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.”
“It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from THESE HONORED DEAD we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—“
That cause—the cause of racial equality and freedom for black people in America—is THE cause, THE animating spirit, that drives today’s marchers and protesters and freedom fighters.
My dad knew that the flag he bled for once stood for slavery and Jim Crow, but he also knew that meanings are not fixed and frozen but hotly contested in the process of creating the “us” and “them” of politics and nationhood.
The hope & promise of an ever more inclusive “us” is what my dad saluted in the American flag and celebrated on July 4th. The same hope & promise move me to celebrate Juneteenth, the occasion that put this nation of the long and winding—and still unfulfilled —path to redemption.
