Dear Fordham Community,
Juneteenth is short for June Nineteenth, and it commemorates the day federal troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, in 1865 to enforce the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation’s abolition of slavery in confederate states. Long before Juneteenth became an official federal holiday in 2021, African Americans in Texas and beyond honored the promise and complexity of the day. Juneteenth represents the promise of a future of full equality while recognizing the longstanding struggle in pursuing a true multiracial democracy. Indeed, each Juneteenth from 1865 to the present has witnessed the bittersweet recognition of racial progress accompanied by violent resistance.
Consider that Juneteenth originates in the simultaneous celebration of slavery’s abolition along with the recognition of the opposition to freedom that caused a more than two-and-a-half-year delay in its legal enforcement, including the two-month delay following the conclusion of the Civil War. Thereafter, the creation of the constitutional right to be free of slavery (13th Amendment) and the right to equality (14th Amendment) were quickly followed by legally imposed barriers to the constitutional promise of racial justice. The structural obstacles included racially imposed prohibitions on property ownership, freedom of movement, voting, employment, and much more. This year’s Juneteenth is witness to the joy of seeing Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in action as the first Black woman on the Supreme Court, at the same time that the Supreme Court imposes severe constraints on the use of programs of racial inclusion like affirmative action in its SFFA v. Harvard decision. Bittersweet indeed.
For this reason, the domestic Juneteenth holiday resonates with many communities and global social justice movements. People fighting for freedom across the globe value the importance of celebrating social change while also acknowledging the continuing resistance to that change. In the midst of so much global turmoil, let us commemorate Juneteenth, like so many civil rights warriors of the past, by honoring the complexity of celebrating the racial progress that exists while remaining vigilant to all the ways that more work needs to be done.
In Celebration and Contemplation,
Tanya Katerí Hernández
Archibald R. Murray Professor of Law
Associate Director, Center on Race, Law and Justice
Fordham Law School
“Juneteenth is one of the many steps toward freedom that Black people were experiencing in America in the early years,” said Dorsey, the author of To Build Our Lives Together: Community Formation in Black Atlanta, 1875-1906 (University of Georgia, 2004).
Celebrating the holiday is wonderful, she said, as long as everyone is aware of the facts.
“Black people celebrated when New York state ended slavery; they celebrated when Connecticut ended slavery. In each step, there’s a moment of celebration. I want Black people to be happy in whatever way they want to be happy. If you want to have a barbecue or a dance party, celebrate. But to prevent the corporate, ‘Come to the Juneteenth sale,’ you emphasize the history.”
Juneteenth commemorates the June 19, 1865, announcement in Galveston proclaiming African Americans’ freedom from slavery in the state of Texas roughly two years after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. In her talk “Making Freedom Dreams Reality: Black Activism, Constitutional Rights and the Ongoing Struggle for Liberation,” held at Rose Hill, Dorsey described what happened in the years immediately following that announcement. She spoke in conversation with Chief Diversity Officer Rafael Zapata for the event, which was sponsored by his office.
Finding Lost Family
The first thing the former slaves did was set off to travel as far as 800 miles to track down lost spouses, siblings, and children. Dorsey said there is a popular misconception that the unpaid labor that slaves were forced to perform was one of the worst indignities they suffered. But in fact, the first thing they strove to repair were shattered familial bonds.
“I want to be clear that the kind of the sociological arguments that were made by white scholars in the 1960s that slavery destroyed the Black family are nonsensical,” she said.
“Yes, it broke up individual Black families, but the concept of family, the feeling people had for their relatives, their children, their mates—that is a human phenomenon that slavery doesn’t have the ability to disrupt.”
Entering Politics to Help Their Communities
There was also an explosion of interest in learning to read, she said, as well as a push to exercise the political power granted in 1870 by the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which gave Black men the right to vote.
“What I found sort of breathtaking was the boldness of their determination to use elected office not to benefit themselves, but to benefit their community,” she said.
Much of the progress that the formerly enslaved made after Juneteenth unraveled when United States Federal troops pulled out of Southern states in 1877 and the era of Reconstruction ended, Dorsey said. Understanding the backlash that followed Juneteeth, she said, is important for putting today’s struggles for racial justice into perspective.
“I’m going to celebrate Juneteenth…. but also know that my focus has to be on the next step and the next step.”
]]>On Monday, the University will close in honor of Juneteenth, a growing national holiday that celebrates a remarkable event. On June 19th, 1865, Union soldiers reached and physically liberated the thousands of enslaved people of Galveston, Texas, several months after the end of the Civil War and more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. Ever since, the celebration of Juneteenth has spread outwards from Texas, a reminder of the grueling struggle necessary for this nation to live up to its founding ideals of freedom and equality. Juneteenth celebrates a moment of joy, but it also reminds us of the terrible road that lay ahead for millions released from bondage with only the clothes on their backs. It reminds us of the long and unfinished struggle for true freedom.
To learn more, join the University’s Juneteenth event, Making Freedom Dreams Reality: Black Activism, Constitutional Rights & The Ongoing Struggle for Liberation, on Tuesday, June 20, from noon to 1:15 p.m., in the McShane Campus Center, Room 112, and Via Zoom (note that you must use your Fordham account to access the Zoom session).
All my best,
Tania Tetlow
President
In an online conversation on June 16, Westenley (Wes) Alcenat, Ph.D., an assistant professor of history, urban, American, and African American studies at Fordham, and Rafael Zapata, Fordham’s chief diversity officer, discussed how the two events are tied to each other.
“You have this classic example of hundreds of thousands of people who were free in Texas but would remain unfree for another two years because the news was suppressed,” Alcenat said.
Just as the news of the Emancipation Proclamation took years to reach enslaved people in Texas, the news of the Haitian revolution—and the French Revolution—took years to reach Black men and women who might have been emboldened by such victories.
“If you go back to 1791, not only were words of the French Revolution being suppressed among the enslaved population in Saint-Domingue (as it was known back then) but news of the Haitian revolution, which lasted over a decade, was suppressed among the free Black and enslaved population here in the United States,” he said.
When the Haitian people finally won their independence from France in 1804, it also had unexpected consequences for the United States, he said. In a sense, it was both a gift and a curse for Black and indigenous people.
“It’s a gift in the sense that, nowhere else had this ever taken place before in human history—enslaved people rebelling and fomenting a revolution that established a state,” he said.
“At the same time, with the loss of Saint-Domingue as such a productive colony, France all of a sudden found itself without the funds to continue its many continental wars, so it turned over the Louisiana territory to the United States, which doubled the size. So, the domestic slave economy in the U.S. expanded very fast.”
Victory also brought serious hardships to the new Haitian nation, as the French would demand punitive reparations for its “loss of assets.” A recent New York Times investigative series, The Ransom, showed how two centuries of debt and dependency would follow.
While Haiti is still to this day struggling to thrive as a nation, Alcenat, a Haitian native, said that the principles guiding its founding can be found in the spirit of today’s Black Lives Matter movement.
When the country was formed, “Haitian constitutionalism,” as he dubbed it, granted citizenship to anyone who was indigenous or of African descent. Most of the indigenous inhabitants had been massacred by Christopher Columbus, but the move symbolically restored dignity to those who claimed the land first. Even the name of the new country, Haiti, which means “island of mountains,” was the name the indigenous inhabitants had chosen for the island.
“It’s not reparations in the conventional wisdom, but as a returning of dignity to that to whom it belonged and humanizing the indigenous folks whose land this was in the first place, and in the process, claiming for themselves a new form of indigenity,” he said.
What really connects the Haitian constitutionalism to Black Lives Matter was the principle that said that for someone to become a Haitian, they first had to declare themselves Black. Under the new post-revolution laws, white males were explicitly banned from owning land and property.
“This is the precedent to the Black Lives Matter, because what it’s saying is, the degraded, the dehumanized, the oppressed, those who are at the very bottom of society, we are going to reverse the order. They really do know what freedom is because they also know what non-freedom looks like,” he said.
“There are historians who very much want to argue that this was reverse racism, and excuse my French, but that is pure B.S. It had little to do with whiteness because in fact, white men could become Haitian. All they would have to do is say, ‘I declare myself Black,’” Alcenat said.
It wasn’t an abstract concept either, as he noted that during the war, 400 to 500 Polish soldiers who had been sent by Napoleon to reclaim the island and reimpose slavery defected from the French army and stayed on the island permanently. Their descendants can be found there to this day.
“In order to incorporate them into this new revolutionary society, the Haitians had to find a way to assert the principle of Black freedom, but not have that principle restricted by race,” he said.
“So Black freedom is, in a sense, the most capacious, most expansive form of freedom that was allowed.”
Zapata noted that although this was the third time the University had honored Juneteenth, this was the first event that connected it to research on Black liberation.
“The Haitian revolution was always an important piece to the notions of freedom,” he said.
“I can think of no better way to honor Juneteenth than to honor our outstanding faculty whose research is so close to this work”
The conversation was sponsored by the Office of the Chief Diversity Officer, the Office of Multicultural Affairs, and the Office of the Provost.
]]>
On 19 June 1865, news of the Emancipation Proclamation finally reached Galveston, Texas, more than two years after President Lincoln issued the order. In her book, On Juneteenth, professor and Pulitzer prizewinner Annette Gordon-Reed writes, “Slavery was just a blink of an eye away from the years my grandparents and their friends were born. Although I was angered by the stories I heard about their lives under Jim Crow, and I had my own issues about the treatment of Blacks in my lifetime, they surely compared life as it was, knowing what it could have been but for the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, and General Order No. 3. there was a very long way to go before we had full and equal citizenship, we were able to gather together as a family to celebrate.”
This Juneteenth we still have a long way to go, as evidenced by racist murders in a Buffalo supermarket; the rise of an odious “replacement theory” and the appalling embrace and advancement of white supremacist ideologies among some Americans. These movements are not merely continuations of racism, but a backlash against the progress we are making as a nation in redressing the historic mistreatment of Black people.
That backlash, I am convinced, is ultimately doomed to fail. (As a priest, I have to believe that our better angels will prevail. Must prevail—with God’s help.) And I honestly believe that those angels are loose in our country. Why do I believe this? Not since the Civil Rights Movement have so many Americans committed themselves not just to honest conversations about race, but to concrete action. Individuals and institutions are mainstreaming anti-racist attitudes and policies that would have seemed out of reach even five years ago.
Fordham is committed to that work in ways large and small (you can find information on our progress here).
Since 2020 the University has made Juneteenth a paid holiday to celebrate the end of slavery in the United States (this year observed on Monday, 20 June, since it falls on a Sunday), and to reflect upon our individual and collective responsibility to continue the necessary work of confronting racism and educating for justice. This year Fordham will host a talk by Westenley (Wes) Alcenat, Ph.D., assistant professor of history, and of urban, American, and African American studies at Fordham, entitled “Juneteenth, the Haitian Revolution & the Struggle for Black Liberation.” The talk will broadcast via Zoom at this link, on Thursday, June 16, from Noon to 1:15⋅p.m.
In her book, Professor Gordon-Reed writes:
If we can achieve freedom for millions of Black Americans, we can achieve equality. This Juneteenth I invite you both to work and to pray with all your heart and all your soul that “the more perfect union” spoken of in the Preamble to the Constitution might be built in our lifetimes.
Sincerely,
Joseph M. McShane, S.J.
“For some people it did work out; for some people, it did not,” said Stovall, dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, during the June 17 panel discussion offered as part of the virtual 2021 Block Party reunion for the Lincoln Center campus.
Rafael Zapata, Fordham’s chief diversity officer, moderated the discussion of Juneteenth, which marks the date—June 19, 1865—when the abolition of slavery was completed with the arrival of Union troops at Galveston, Texas, more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation.
The discussion ranged from the history of Juneteenth celebrations to the emancipation process in Caribbean nations to the aftermath of slavery’s abolition in the U.S.
Liberation “was something that Black people fought for themselves; they weren’t just sort of waiting around for it to happen for them,” said Stovall, author of White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea (Princeton University Press, 2021). The Civil War saw the largest slave revolts in American history, as well as “massive mobilization” of formerly enslaved people to serve in the Union armies, he said. But promises of the land that former slaves needed to establish their own farming livelihoods fell through, for the most part, forcing them into sharecropping, a form of pseudo-slavery in which they were “under the thumb of their former masters,” he said.
One of the panelists, Tyesha Maddox, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Fordham Department of African and African American Studies, described how many formerly enslaved people turned to benevolent associations or mutual aid organizations “in which they came together [and]pooled their resources of money in order to take care of themselves in the ways that the government was not providing help for them.”
“We see a similar thing happening post-emancipation in the Caribbean, where these people are trying to … make lives for themselves and not just survive post-emancipation, but thrive, and set up communities for themselves and live as equal citizens,” she said.
The Struggle in the Caribbean
Panelists described a fitful abolition of slavery throughout Caribbean nations, with freedom often seeming precarious. As in the United States, many slaveowners in these nations still continued with slavery months or years after it was abolished “so that they can continue with this free manual labor,” Maddox said.
Stovall noted that Haiti was isolated and made to suffer after achieving its independence in an 1804 revolution that abolished slavery. The government had to pay reparations to the French for the seizure of slaveowners’ property, and it wasn’t until the early 21st century that France finally abolished all duties on Haiti stemming from its revolution, he said.
In Guadeloupe, slavery was abolished for only about a decade before it was reestablished under Napoleon, and during World War II there were rumors that France’s Vichy government would bring slavery back to the Caribbean, he said. “There was always this sense that … you couldn’t rely on [freedom],” he said.
The Growth of African American Communities
Another panelist, Michele Prettyman, a scholar of African American cinema and visual and popular culture in the Fordham communication and media studies department, noted the wave of Black elected officials in the U.S. following the Civil War as well as the growth of African American communities—like the one ravaged during the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921.
“Tulsa is … the most striking embodiment of what happens as a result of this incredible wave of business and leadership and education,” she said. At the same time, “even killing people in a very literal sense did not destroy this animating impulse of Black life that comes out of these moments of just real despair and real darkness and … just tremendous odds and obstacles,” she said.
Later, asked how the idea of freedom is expressed in Black creativity, she said it is not just under the purview of historians. “If we keep it in our poetry and our art and our music and our culture, it becomes something that is owned and shared, and not just something that’s commemorated on single days or in single moments,” she said. “It should be a part of all of our lives, intimately, and how we legislate, how we vote, how we commemorate.”
Democracy for All?
Asked by Zapata about the current “assault on voting rights” in the U.S., Stovall said that “there’s a real lack of respect for the very idea of democracy.”
“Even though you have, of course, the rejection of this being in any way racially characterized … it is really hard to escape the impression that if Black people were not able to vote, a lot of conservative white people would be a whole lot happier,” he said.
Stovall said the federal government’s creation of a Juneteenth holiday “has all come together really fast,” but also pointed out state legislatures’ recent moves to prevent school districts “from teaching the idea that racism is an intrinsic part of American history.”
“So how you can hold these two concepts together at the same time is frankly beyond me,” he said, “because if you acknowledge the role of slavery to the extent that you have a national holiday to celebrate its abolition, that says something very profound about American history, and so I think this is a country that’s still very much struggling with how do you deal with these different concepts.”
Stovall ended the event by turning his computer to show a lit lamp that was owned by his great-great-grandmother, who was born a slave. “The lamp still shines,” he said. “Our history still shines. And I think Juneteenth represents the fact that our experience as a whole still shines, down to the present day, and will shine in the future.”
In honor of the Juneteenth holiday, we are excited to share news of campus events and local community celebrations, as well as a link to further reading on the Juneteenth holiday.
CAMPUS EVENTS
Virtual Faculty Panel and Q&A: The History & Contemporary Significance of Juneteenth
Thursday, June 17, 12 – 1 p.m., featuring:
* Dr. Tyesha Maddox, Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies
* Dr. Michele Prettyman, Assistant Professor of Communications and Media Studies, and
* Dr. Tyler Stovall, Professor of History and Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Registration required: click here.
Sponsored by the Office of the CDO and the Office of Alumni Relations and offered as part of this year’s Virtual Lincoln Center Block Party Reunion on June 16 and17, which celebrates five of Fordham University’s Lincoln Center-based schools. For more information, or if you are an alumnus who would like to register for the Block Party, click here.
Fordham Law School’s Juneteenth Virtual Celebration: Juneteenth & Dies Community, Texas: A Freedmen Community’s 150-Year Evolution and the Law
Wednesday, June 16, 6 – 7:30 p.m., featuring F. Sunnie Frazier of Lamar University. Co-sponsored by the Center on Race, Law, and Justice. Registration Required: click here.
The Frazier family narrative is set within the village of Dies Community, a farming hamlet of previously enslaved African Americans who congregated after Juneteenth, purchased land, and established their own religious, educational and community institutions.
The Frazier family narrative will be analyzed through a historical lens of state and federal law from the earliest celebration of Juneteenth to the current day. Ms. Frazier will share her family’s experience as leaders in their community addressing voting rights, land acquisition and property rights, education law, and Jim Crow segregation.
WFUV Spins Black Artists Exclusively on Juneteenth
June 19, 6 a.m. – 4 p.m.
WFUV will be honoring Juneteenth by spinning exclusively Black artists. In addition, the station will feature 20 artists speaking about what Juneteenth means to them. During the midday, the FUV News team will host a featured discussion on the meaning and history of reparations.
COMMUNITY EVENTS & CELEBRATIONS
* June 14 – 19: The Schomburg Center’s Virtual Literary Festival: Reading the African Diaspora
This year, the Arturo A. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a gem of the NYC Public Library system, is hosting their annual day-long Literary Festival over six days, June 14-19, 2021, as the center’s doors remain closed due to COVID-19. Throughout the week, featured authors and books will explore concepts of freedom, culminating on June 19: Juneteenth.
* June 18, 6 – 8 p.m.: Mayor and First Lady’s Juneteenth Celebration, Harlem
Bill de Blasio, Mayor of the City of New York, and Chirlane McCray, First Lady of the City of New York, are hosting a Juneteenth Celebration at St. Nicholas Park – James Baldwin Lawn (Cross Streets: 135th and St. Nicholas Ave).
This event, which is free, open to the public, and family-friendly, requires registration. If you would like to attend, please contact Bill Colona, Director of Government Relations, Federal and Urban Affairs, by email at [email protected] by no later than 5 p.m. on June 15, and also include the names, email addresses, and affiliated organizations, of any guests you would like to bring.
* JUNE 19, 11 a.m.: Juneteenth Virtual Storytime with StriveHigher Inc.
Join Bronx-based children’s educational organization, StriveHigher Inc., for a special Juneteenth storytime. Learn about the history of this special day and ways that you can celebrate it. Our special guest, Ms. Loretta, will be reading Juneteenth: A Children’s Story. She will also share her experience growing up during the civil rights movement. Courtesy of Fordham University, a free hard copy of the book will be provided to the first 50 children who register.
To register a child, click here.
* JUNE 19, 7 – 8:30 pm: Afro-Waves — Virtual Concert w/AJA MONET and CVGEBIRD
Join the East Harlem-based Caribbean Cultural Center & African Diaspora Institute as they honor the spirit of Juneteenth with a virtual concert featuring artist-activists Aja Monet and Cvgebird.
FOR FURTHER READING
* Visit Bronx independent bookstore, The Lit Bar’s On Juneteenth We Read website.
]]>
I write to you to remind you that (as I mentioned to you in a letter that I sent to the University community last June), the University has established Juneteenth (the date upon which news of emancipation finally reached Galveston, Texas, on 19 June 1865, more than two years after President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation) as an annual paid holiday for all Fordham employees. Since Juneteenth falls on a Saturday this year, the holiday will be observed and celebrated on Friday, 18 June.
This Juneteenth also marks a tragic anniversary: it is almost exactly 100 years since the Tulsa Race Massacre. On May 31, 1921, a mob of white people stormed “Black Wall Street,” a wealthy Black neighborhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma, murdering hundreds of its residents, looting their property, and burning their homes. Our own Dr. Olivia Hooker, a longtime professor of psychology at Fordham, survived the Tulsa massacre as a child. In addition to serving generations of Fordham students as a teacher, mentor, and advocate, she was the first Black woman to serve in the U.S. Coast Guard, and a pioneer in the field of psychometrics.
The unprovoked Tulsa attack was far from the only case of white violence in the Jim Crow era: I invite you to explore the University’s Anti-Black Racial Violence Resources page, and especially the books and multimedia conversations listed therein, for further information.
In the coming days, Rafael Zapata, our Chief Diversity Officer, will be sharing with you the details about the slate of programming that he, his colleagues and his staff, and departments across the University have developed for the observance of this important date on the University’s calendar.
Let us pray that the work of hundreds of thousands of Black Americans and their allies in the past year—a year bookended by the death of George Floyd and the conviction of his killer—will mark a turning point in our nation’s history. I know you join with me in the hope that the momentum that they have created will lead to the formation of that “more perfect union” of the Constitution, a more perfect union in which racial justice and equality will reign in our hearts and throughout our country.
Finally, please know that I continue to keep all of you, and especially the Black members of our community, in my daily prayers.
Sincerely,
Joseph M. McShane, S.J.
I write to you this evening to inform you that Friday, June 19, will be a paid holiday for all Fordham employees this year, and every year thereafter, in observance of Juneteenth, the date upon which news of emancipation finally reached Galveston, Texas.
It was on June 19, 1865, when Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger along with more than 1,800 federal troops arrived to take control of the state, nearly two months after the end of the Civil War, confirming the freedom of the last remaining enslaved persons in the deepest parts of the South. Gen. Granger actually read the Proclamation to the enslaved persons that day in Galveston. The 13th Amendment was ratified six months later, in December of 1865.
If you sense that we came to this decision suddenly, you are correct: in the wake of Governor Cuomo’s executive order recognizing Juneteenth as a holiday for state employees this year, a number of you in the University community today asked about Fordham’s intentions to follow suit. We heard you, and we are. (The governor will push for legislation to establish June 19 as an official state holiday next year and thereafter, making New York the 48th state to do so.)
I have attached two documents as aids to our shared day of thought and prayer. Happily, there are also many new and excellent anti-racist resources now available, including a Black Lives Matter resource guide from Rafael Zapata, our chief diversity officer. In addition, Campus Ministry, the Center for Community Engaged Learning, and the Office of Multicultural Affairs will be sharing details tomorrow about a slate of virtual programming to be offered Friday.
In many ways this new Fordham holiday is a symbolic measure, and I will be announcing more concrete actions by the University soon. But symbols matter. Symbols inspire, symbols console, symbols define what—and whom—we care about. I hope you will take this holiday in that spirit.
Finally, know that I keep all of you, and especially our Black brothers and sisters, in my prayers during these troubled and troubling times. I will truly pray that what we are seeing now are the birthing pains of a nation that lives up to its promise of freedom and equality for all.
Sincerely,
Joseph M. McShane, S.J.
]]>