Gen Y seems less than enthused about the day that slaves in Texas found out they were free. How will Black Independence Day fare in 2050?
So how do you celebrate Juneteenth?” I asked my Twitter friends a few weeks ago. After a dead-tweet silence, I retweeted myself for emphasis. Even then, just a handful of my 300 or so Twitter friends responded with a few half-baked answers. “Go to some crappy festival,” one Californian said. “I celebrate by doing nothing,” said a childhood friend from Texas.
Unsatisfied, I polled my friends in Gchat conversations and Facebook status updates, where one of my brother’s friends said she’d commemorate the holiday, simply, by “not slavin.”
But this wasn’t my first time questioning an often low-level of enthusiasm to celebrate what is often calledBlack Independence Day. (More on that later.)
A quick primer: On June 19, 1865, Gen. Gordon Granger stood on the balcony of the Ashton Villa in Galveston, Texas, to declare that President Abraham Lincoln had set all slaves free. This news, of course, came two years after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued and a couple of months after Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox.
Belated freedom, but freedom nonetheless.
