![]() ![]() How does marking Juneteenth express our values as Americans? Why is it important for all Americans to mark this holiday? An observer who wrote about it said that Brazos River ran with blood of those who were shot by the slaveowners as they tried to go across it. I don’t know what you people are talking about.’ Some of the enslaved in Galveston ran away to try to get free and they tried to cross the Brazos River into Louisiana. ![]() When the order was announced, many went to their masters and said ‘well, we’re free now,’ and they were happy and celebrating and the masters said ‘forget about it. There’s a river between Louisiana and Texas called the Brazos River. But there also was a lot of bloodshed over the announcement. On the one hand, it is important to recognize that people who were still enslaved after the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t know that they were supposed to be free, and this is something that should be corrected in our history. The Juneteenth holiday doesn’t change anything in the present, but it was a change for the people in Texas at the time. Government often does that: If they can’t accomplish what they originally intended, they try to do something to show the people who are concerned that they’re still interested in them. We know that the holiday was announced in 2021 in part because the Congress could not pass the George Floyd Act after Floyd was murdered by police in May of 2020. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and professor of history emerita, discusses the history of Juneteenth.īerry: There’s a bit of ambivalence among some people about Juneteenth being a federal holiday. In the film, Mary Frances Berry, the Geraldine R. It’s also a more racialized holiday and the way that we think about race in the story of America plays into this a lot because for a long time, we have not wanted to acknowledge the salience of race. Juneteenth is an interesting counterpart to July 4, because rather than marking national independence, it’s individual freedom. Juneteenth is a celebration of those ideals. We tried to reintegrate the Confederates into American life, and the cost of that was suppressing the ideals that we fought for. We took some steps towards taking the property of the Confederates and redistributing it, but then we went back on it and notoriously didn’t do it, which is part of the reason that Reconstruction fails. But after the Revolution, we drove the Loyalists out of the country, we took their property and redistributed it and wrote the Loyalists out of our national culture so that everyone who remained in America was on the side of the patriots in 1776. ![]() ![]() Interestingly, the revolution was strongly supported by about a third of the population, almost a third was against it, and a third was in the middle. The main problem is that a lot of the country identifies with the losing side in the Civil War and that makes it harder to say the Union were the good guys and the Confederates were the bad guys. Acknowledging that it’s the Civil War that really brought freedom on an individual level is something that we’ve been very reluctant to do. Then we identify with the people who defeated the rebels in the Civil War and we say those people brought us freedom, but we don’t focus on that as much as we focus on the Revolution. Roosevelt: We have this very strange understanding of American history where we identify with the rebels in the Revolutionary War, and we say those people brought us freedom. Why did it take so long for an official holiday to be created to mark Juneteenth? Penn Today reached out to Berry and Roosevelt to discuss the holiday’s history, why it matters to all Americans, and how it was one landmark on the road to true liberty for all. “Educators throughout the country have expressed to me how excited they are to use the film and the accompanying teacher-developed lesson plans in their classrooms.” We created ‘Juneteenth’ with that goal in mind,” says Andrea “Ang” Reidell, director of outreach and curriculum at APPC’s Leonore Annenberg Institute for Civics. “Annenberg Classroom’s mission is to provide free, nonpartisan, high-quality civic education resources to educators, students, and the general public. Discussion panelists will include Cornelia Swinson, executive director of the Johnson House Historic Site in Germantown, a National Historic Landmark and Underground Railroad site. The discussion afterward will focus on Juneteenth and other historical emancipation celebrations in Philadelphia. the film will be screened at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. A post-film discussion will follow online and will include historian and film participant Eric Foner of Columbia University. Upcoming viewings include a livestreaming of the film on WPSU, the PBS station for central Pennsylvania at Penn State University, on June 15 at 2 p.m. ![]()
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