From a conversation between the Reverend Alonzo Hickman and Adam Sunraider, a race-baiting United States senator. As a boy, Sunraider was known as Bliss. Hickman raised him. The two are speaking of old times:
Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Vintage, 2000).
I posted this passage in 2020. Notice the final sentence: “‘Even if folks sometimes try to make us believe it never happened or that it was a mistake that it ever did....’” In 2025, that sentence seems more relevant than ever. Just one timely example: Rolling Stone reports today that
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s office requested “a passive approach to Juneteenth messaging” for the holiday on Thursday commemorating the end of slavery, according to an email obtained by Rolling Stone. The news was relayed by the Pentagon’s Office of the Chief of Public Affairs, which said it wasn’t planning to publish Juneteenth-related content online, per the email.The RS article goes on to note that a 2024 article about Juneteenth has been removed from a U.S. Army website.
Recall too the assertions in recent years that Black people were better off enslaved.
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June 20: Not a word about this Juneteenth from the White House, save for one social media post about there being “too many non-working holidays in America.” In the first term, he marked every Juneteenth, even before it was a federal holiday. Who made it a federal holiday? Joe Biden.
Related reading
More OCA Juneteenth posts (Pinboard)
comments: 2
As an English-speaking foreigner, that passage helps me to understand why Juneteenth is as important as the date of the Emancipation Proclamation, because otherwise I wouldn't "get it." I suspect many US non-Blacks couldn't put it into words for me, but I have no way of knowing. (I can't go to the US and ask)
Given the inability of so many white Americans to even acknowledge the reality of slavery, I would imagine that many have no idea what it's about. Or perhaps they would think of it as something to satisfy "the blacks," as they would say.
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