Friday, June 19th, has been named a Federal Holiday.
Such an honor has been a long time coming.
The annual celebration commemorates the day when the last enslaved African Americans were informed, they are free.
It is one of those historical abnormalities that finds eight of the first 12 presidents were slaveholders.
This includes Thomas Jefferson, the writer of the Declaration of Independence.
“All men are created equal,” Jefferson wrote.
At the time, that meant all white people are created, not Black people, who were slaves.
It is difficult to assess the exact damage slavery did to the generations that came before and to those who have come after, except to say, slavery is about as bad as it gets, especially in a democracy like ours which takes such great pride in our Constitution.
Juneteenth doesn’t change history. Nothing can change history – not even re-writing it changes it.
At least now we are a nation free of slavery – and have been free of slavery since Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation issued in 1863, during the height of the American Civil War.
We were a slave-keeper nation from the start.
We all must face up to that.
But we are no longer a slave keeper nation – and we have a nation where our citizens, Black, Brown, or whatever are not slaughtering one another.
We have our problems with race, but we remain today a free people protected by the law.