Walgreens is not the only company that is virtue signaling for Juneteenth. Nike, Twitter, and the NFL have said they will give their employees the day off on June 19 from now on. Again, it’s lovely, but as Jamelle Bouie put it, “paid holidays, while nice, are a grossly inadequate response to calls for justice and equality.”[3]

“Happy Juneteenth,” like those black squares on social media, is everywhere. None of the umpteen corporations that jump on this bandwagon to keep profits going explain what it means, of course. Juneteenth was not Emancipation Day (January 1, 1863), nor the formal end to the Civil War (April 9, 1865). It was the moment when the Union General, Gordon Granger, delivered the news of the Emancipation Proclamation to a group of enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, a full seventeen days after the last Confederate General, Edmund Kirby Smith, surrendered in Galveston.

On the one hand, it is a great day to celebrate emancipation because it marks a moment of awareness, of knowledge—a moment when enslaved people knew that they were no longer enslaved. There were similar holidays in Russia for when serfs learned that they were free. On the other hand, the day is still fundamentally about a moment when freedom was bestowed upon a population. It still rings of benevolent white folks granting something. Would it be possible to find a date that honors the struggle, agency, and persistence of African American enslaved people as they survived the trials and tribulations of centuries of slavery?

And why the delay? Why has it taken a century-and-a-half to have Walgreens, Nike, and all the rest recognize it?

The answer is that there were always multiple Civil Wars. One was over the political and economic institution of slavery in the United States in the nineteenth century. Lincoln’s Union outlasted the Confederacy in 1865. But the cessation of armed conflict did nothing to settle what they used to call the “Negro Question”—what to make of Africans forced for hundreds of years to live, work, and die in a land they helped create but could not profit from. In that Civil War, which lasted beyond Appomattox, men and women of African descent remained inferior, convicts in the making, relegated to minstrel status as always entertaining, always deferential—or, in today’s Fox News lingo, always able to “shut up and dribble.”[4] Celebrating the power of Black persistence in the face of blanketing inferiorization for another century and more after the end of legalized, Christianized enslavement is a true victory, one that corporations have only now begun to recognize because dollars force them to.

Notes

[1] Steven Greenhouse, “In-House Audit Says Wal-Mart Violated Labor Laws,” The New York Times, January 13, 2004, sec. U.S., https://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/13/us/in-house-audit-says-wal-mart-violated-labor-laws.html.

[2] Catherine Ruetschlin and Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, “The Retail Race Divide” (Demos.org, June 2, 2015), https://www.demos.org/research/retail-race-divide-how-retail-industry-perpetuating-racial-inequality-21st-century.

[3] Jamelle Bouie, “Opinion | Why Juneteenth Matters,” The New York Times, June 18, 2020, sec. Opinion, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/18/opinion/juneteenth-slavery-freedom.html.

[4] Anne Twitty, “Ole Miss’s Monument to White Supremacy,” The Atlantic, June 19, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/ole-misss-monument-white-supremacy/613255/.