Major General Gordon Granger issued General Order No. 3 on June 19, 1865 after arriving at District Headquarters in Galveston, Texas on the 18th :
“The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.”
Juneteenth has been a holiday in Texas since 1980. Ed Kilgore asks what it will take to make it a national holiday.
That may be as difficult as overcoming Republicans’ objections to ridding the Capitol of Confederate statues. Or getting NASCAR fans to put away their Confederate flags — which are as rich in historical symbolism as nooses.
Donald Trump found an historic setting — Tulsa, Oklahoma, site of a race massacre that killed hundreds of Black residents and burned 40 square blocks of the Greenwood district (“The Burning of Black Wall Street, Revisited” by Brent Staples) on June 1, 1921 — to relaunch his campaign after a coronavirus hiatus.
Trump offered the usual fare — including a ample portion of “white racial grievance” — to his assembled fans, as described by Jose A. Del Real (“With ‘kung flu,’ ‘thugs,’ and ‘our heritage,’ Trump leans on racial grievance as he reaches for a campaign reset”):
He referred to the disease caused by the novel coronavirus as the “kung flu.” He called racial justice demonstrators “thugs.” He attacked efforts to take down Confederate statues as an assault on “our heritage.” And in an ominous hypothetical, he described a “very tough hombre” breaking into a young woman’s home while her husband is away.
Today Trump is doubling down on race-baiting:
“Historically presidents have tried to calm tensions and not stoke them but elect a racist reality television host….” — Molly Jong-Fast
Last summer, Brian Stelter reviewed Trump’s history of race-baiting, suggesting that “The pattern is the big story.”
These events brought to mind a passage in C. Van Woodward’s The Strange Career of Jim Crow describing white Southerners’ frustration at the economic, political, and social crises of the 1890s:
There had to be a scapegoat. And all along the line signals were going up to indicate that the Negro was the approved object of aggression. These ‘permissions-to-hate’ came from sources that had formerly denied such permission. They came from the federal courts in numerous opinions, from Northern liberals eager to conciliate the South, from Southern conservatives who had abandoned their race policy of moderation in their struggle against the Populists, from the Populists in their mood of disillusionment with their former Negro allies, and from a national temper suddenly expressed by imperialistic adventures and aggressions against colored peoples in distant lands. But for the majority it came much easier to blame the Negro for their defeat, to make him the scapegoat, and to vent upon him the pent up accumulation of bitterness against the legitimate offenders who had escaped their wrath.
“The pattern is the big story.” Donald Trump has been offering 21st century permissions-to-hate from the White House since his inauguration.
The public protests and other activity across the country may suggest that the tide is turning. Time will tell how well and how far things go with efforts to reform police culture and, more broadly, to change the status of Black Americans.
The prospects of ridding the White House of Donald Trump — critical if we are to see meaningful change — are going to play out in unpredictable ways over the next four and a half months. The story from Tulsa — where few participants wore masks, but attendance fell far short of campaign-generated expectations — was mixed.
The small crowd and rows of empty seats in Tulsa last week actually restored a measure of my faith in human nature. For all his lies, and hate, and divisiveness — which his supporters either celebrate or accept in stride — it was reassuring to think (at least last week at the BOK Center) that the Republican base is not so gullible as to believe every tale the fabulist in the White House (and Fox News Channel) spins.
Donald Trump is not even trying to defeat the coronavirus. He’s trying to wish it away. And at least a portion of his base knows it is still here. Score one for common sense over motivated reasoning.
Finally, a note about style: ‘Black’ is the new black. “Why hundreds of American newsrooms have started capitalizing the ‘b’ in Black,” describes a step toward “affirming the experience and existence of an entire group of people who built this country and have contributed to every sector.”