Last week’s local commemoration of America’s newest federal holiday, Juneteenth, was a heartening reminder of one of our country’s oldest and best attributes: the ability to evolve.
As it has for three decades, the Yakima County NAACP hosted this year’s celebration, which featured great food, music, booths with practical information and a symbolic Freedom Ride from Central Lutheran Church to Southeast Community Park last Saturday.
Juneteenth memorializes June 19, 1865, the day word of President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation — issued two and a half years earlier — finally reached Black slaves in Texas. Lincoln’s order applied to all enslaved people living in states that had seceded during the Civil War, which claimed 620,000 American lives.
Ultimately, the bloody conflict took Lincoln himself. Two months before the last slaves heard they were free, our 16th president, a Republican, was assassinated by a delusional Confederate supporter.
The 1860s might’ve been America’s darkest period, but Lincoln’s proclamation stood, and the country held.
Now, more than 160 years later, another White House proclamation — issued just last Tuesday — reads in part:
“Juneteenth is an acknowledgment of the truth of our nation’s history. It is about realizing the idea that America was founded on: All people are created equal and deserve to be treated equally throughout their lives. It is about the generations of brave Black leaders and selfless activists who never let us walk away from that idea …”
Those are words worth considering carefully, because they remind us of some of America’s core values. They recognize that while the deep scars of our past remain, we’ve continued to progress.
In the 1860s, it would’ve been unthinkable that we’d ever have a Black president, yet American voters selected Barack Obama for two terms. Until the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified in 1920, women weren’t allowed to vote.
It’s taken time, incalculable effort and it’s cost countless lives, but America’s path has pointed steadily upward for two and a half centuries.
It’s especially important to remember that now, at a time when loud and misguided voices would have us move backward and give up hard-won gains.
Today’s extremists argue against equality, against individual rights.
Some even suggest we give up our most precious right — our freedom — and fall into lockstep behind an authoritarian government that would dictate what we could read, who we could marry and what our spiritual beliefs should be.
They shout at us on TV, over social media — even in local, state and national government proceedings.
But the wrongheadedness of their views is starkly obvious at gatherings like last week’s celebration in Yakima. And the words of those who know better offer encouragement for the future.
“If we forget about history,” local NAACP president James Parks told Saturday’s local Juneteenth gathering, “we’re condemning ourselves to go right back.”
We’ve come too far and sacrificed too much to make a mistake like that.
