Spring(s) | On Juneteenth, Blackness and the Fourth of July
- Published: August 7, 2024
By Cyraina Johnson-Roullier
Although Juneteenth is now a recognized federal holiday in the United States, it is still only three years old. While that makes it new on the national stage, and, as a result, now legitimate, this understanding actually shines an inquisitory light on the idea of legitimacy itself, rather than on the historical significance that has justified the elevation of Juneteenth to the level of a federal holiday, and what that might and/or should mean to us as we move beyond the present moment.
Yet we must ask, is the fact that it has finally been given a seat at the mainstream table, the most important measure of what might be considered as Juneteenth’s legitimacy? Or, even more meaningful, is legitimacy even the most important issue to consider in relation to it? Now that Juneteenth has become “legitimate,” perhaps we are called upon more urgently to learn about, participate in and celebrate its meaning?
But before we can even begin to move in that direction, perhaps we should first stop for a moment and ask, what is legitimacy anyway? What might a deeper look at this tell us about Juneteenth and how we might understand its cultural significance as we move forward into our collective future? What exactly might we understand about that future as a result?
These are important questions, especially now that Juneteenth, and its corollary, the Fourth of July, are both over for 2024. The fact that the nation now has two holidays, only 14 days apart, that celebrate our cherished American values of freedom and equality — one with which we are nationally unaccustomed and somewhat awkward, the other a celebration of freedom whose exuberant narrative all of us have lived for our entire lives — becomes an opportunity not just to celebrate, but to reflect. This is particularly so in light of our coming sesquicentennial in 2026 — the celebration of 250 years of our democratic American experiment which, at its inception, had never before been seen in the world.
As the Puritan clergyman John Winthrop prophesied in his 1630 sermon to the would-be settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, “A Model of Christian Charity,” at the outset, America was to be “a city upon a hill.”
Winthrop worte: “The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken … we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world.”
What Winthrop was trying to foreground was the covenant with God formed by the Puritans to build, in coming to America, a deeply Christian community grounded in compassion for and love of one’s fellows. Though the Puritan was a European transplant, this covenant of community, freedom, equality and justice under God was a human one, with no consideration of color.
Yet in the America of 224 years later, at a meeting of stalwart abolitionists in Framingham, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston, the newspaper editor William Lloyd Garrison publicly set fire to the American Constitution, calling it “a covenant with death, and an agreement with Hell” in protest of the remanding to slavery of the fugitive slave Anthony Burns under America’s Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.
These historical contradictions highlight the underlying significance of legitimacy when considered in relation to the elevation of Juneteenth to the status of a federal holiday. When brought to the fore in this way, what is such “legitimacy,” beyond a play on color not visible to the naked eye, yet very much in evidence once it renders the two holidays suddenly parallel, standing on equal footing within that frame?
The idea of legitimacy in this instance can be silently seen to carry within it a set of invisible significations that speak to an imprimatur of whiteness, a mainstream stamp of approval lifting the Juneteenth holiday above its historical obscurity deep inside the recesses of Blackness to a wonderfully lit place readily accessible to all. This is because the cultural significance of legitimacy creates here the possibility of more pointed considerations of what exactly freedom and equality mean in and to America, and precisely how nuanced they are and can be in our lives, especially when color is added to the mix — as quietly enfolded within them is the binary of race.
In the case of Juneteenth, this subtle reverberation is to be found in its commemoration of the gifts of personal sovereignty and autonomy to those who lacked them, as dictated by arbitrary laws mandating the absence of these rights due to the color of their skin. In this, Juneteenth represents a celebration of a pride and joy in and of Blackness and its relation to freedom not before realizable as something actually of national significance.
On the other hand, the Fourth of July refers to a very different historical reality: that of freedom of the individual from the subjugation of absolutist monarchy and a system that placed such individuals in a materially determined, hierarchical, social interrelationship determined by heredity, with only very limited possibilities of advancement, if any at all. Here the play on color concerns a view of inequality and the lack of freedom as these are to be found within the parameters of a historical whiteness.
Drawing this parallel between the two holidays makes visible, but also broadens and deepens this play on color by giving it a prominence that it did not have in the past, and could not have without such a juxtaposition. Although Juneteenth has been observed in America since 1866, this has been largely a celebration only here and there and primarily in the African American community, outside of any collective national frame — thus describing an unrecognized, if not entirely neglected, representation of inequality at the heart of America’s very special relationship with ideas of freedom and equality.
In considering these two holidays with and against each other, then, we come to a hidden and specifically American reality: that freedom and unfreedom, equality and inequality, justice and injustice, human liberty and the denial of human rights, along with the struggle to escape these dichotomies, actually transcends the problem of color. Although Juneteenth and the Fourth of July remain distinct holidays with radically different histories, they also represent that place in American history and culture where these contradictions overlap in the name of an unencumbered idea of freedom and equality. They represent the same human desires in both contexts, as they exist beyond the oppositional reality of color. And it is precisely this view of the relation between community, freedom, justice and equality as specifically human values — transcending any polarities of color — which remains today as a powerful legacy of the village of Yellow Springs, whose own history is a story of overcoming such differences to build, achieve and maintain what is and has been a communal embrace of all.
In this, and in so many other ways, we are and have been our own city on a hill. Let the newfound elevation of Juneteenth and its own comment on freedom and equality, now welcomed into the fold, help us to remember that.
*Cyraina Johnson-Roullier is associate professor of modern literature and literature of the Americas at the University of Notre Dame and a former Ford Foundation Fellow who regularly writes for the Chicago Tribune, among other outlets.
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