Bank Holiday to commemorate the end of slavery

It is now 156 years since the state of Texas freed the last slaves, two years after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. It was shocking that such a decisive milestone in the history of the United States was not commemorated as such at the national level. Now the US Congress has just overwhelmingly approved - 415 votes in favour to 14 against - to make Juneteenth, that is June 19 ("Juneteenth" being a portmanteau of "June" and "Nineteenth") a bank holiday, as soon as it is signed into law by President Joe Biden.

It has been a quick debate with hardly any controversy, no doubt the result of the tide unleashed by the murder in May 2020 in Minneapolis of the African-American George Floyd, suffocated for nine endless minutes by the knee of a white policeman, Dereck Chauvin, already condemned to remain in prison for almost the rest of his life. 

This decision by Lincoln, initially opposed to abolitionism, had above all a strategic military character, since in the American Civil War (1861-1865), the liberation of black slaves almost automatically meant the integration of the emancipated slaves into the Union Army. In fact, more than 200,000 freed slaves exchanged their chains for arms, thus contributing to the Union's final victory over the Confederate Southern States. In this territory, slavery remained intact throughout the war, until the surrender of Confederate General Robert Lee on April 9, 1865. However, due to the great distances and the means of communication at the time, the news did not reach the Texan city of Galveston until June 19, the Juneteenth that would henceforth commemorate the official end of slavery throughout the United States.

The history that followed that day in 1865 did not radically change the fate of the black population, which would still suffer long years of segregation, discrimination, prosecution and lynching with impunity in the defeated southern states. Apartheid would prevail in all the farming territories, while in the north of the country, although to a lesser extent, social discrimination would not disappear until the second half of the 20th century, and after a long and bloody struggle for equal civil rights. 

That struggle, led by such prominent figures as the pastor Martin Luther King, would bear fruit under the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson, successor to the assassinated John F. Kennedy. However, the customs and habits of the Administration, and especially among law enforcement officials, remained virtually unchanged, with a practical application of the law that made all blacks, followed later by Hispanics, suspects rather than presumed culprits. 

All this is what has emerged in the aftermath of Floyd's murder and exploited as "systemic racism", as historian Elizabeth Hinton describes in her essay America on Fire (Ed. Liveright, 2021), in which she recounts the failure of President Barack Obama to definitively turn the page on this moral, economic and social apartheid. Donald Trump's four years in the White House have in fact meant an unabashed explosion of so-called white supremacism, a kind of revenge for the defeat in the Civil War and the consequent abolition of the main distinguishing mark of the very prosperous southern Confederate agriculture: forced labour by African-Americans, condemned to remain forever bound, they and their descendants, to a land they did not own. 

Black Democratic Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee spoke of all this when she introduced the new law passed by Congress. In front of the old photo of a black man with a torn back, the Congresswoman described the new federal law as "a great day for freedom". The Republicans have also joined the tide, so that deputies such as John Cornyn have joined the vote in favour after intoning a sort of mea culpa: "Recognising and learning from the mistakes of the past is essential to move forward". Both of them represent Texas. 

This date of June 19 “reminds us of a history marred by brutality and injustice, and it reminds us of the responsibility we have to build a future of progress for all, which honors the ideal of equality” of the United States, said Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.