A day repaid in elation: the joy of Juneteenth

“Lift every voice and sing, Till earth and heaven ring, Ring with the harmonies of Liberty,” goes the lyric written in 1900 by James Weldon Johnson and set to music by his brother J. Rosamond Johnson.

“Stony the road we trod, Bitter the chastening rod, Felt in the days when hope unborn had died. Yet with a steady beat, Have not our weary feet, Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?”

“Lift Every Voice and Sing” within 20 years became known as the Negro National Anthem, in our time the Black National Anthem, and millions of us have sung it standing in solidarity at some all-American holiday, holding hands with fellow Americans in some church at an ecumenical service, knowing that the words are as uplifting as any ever written about the possibilities of change and progress and yes even salvation in a nation that at its birth was a deeply segregated one, with millions of its people living enslaved, and now has become at its best a pluralistic society unrivaled among nations.

And it is fit that today, on the national holiday of Juneteenth, we meditate on the meaning of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” and on the myriad other glories of African-American culture throughout our land, a culture born out of the sins of plunder and overseas capture and enslavement whose people persevered, created the Underground Railroad, fought for their freedom in the Civil War, endured the virtual slavery of Jim Crow and came out the other side undaunted, unbowed, free.

Juneteenth, a glorious portmanteau of a word, celebrates the fact of on June 19, 1865, fully 900 days after President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, Union troops under Major General Gordon Grange finally reaching Galveston and south Texas and telling enslaved Americans that they were free.

You might call it a slow-walking of such major news. But Texas was the most far-flung of the slaveholding Confederate states. And it is huge. Union troops there were few in number. Yes, Robert E. Lee had surrendered 71 days before Juneteenth, on April 29, but, well, better late than never for the good news to get from Virginia to the Gulf.

African-American communities recognized the symbolic import of Juneteenth immediately. In Galveston, freedmen celebrated Jubilee Day just one year later, on June 19, 1866. Still barred in many cases from public parks,, by 1872 Black leaders in Texas had raised $1,000 to buy 10 acres that today is known as Houston’s Emancipation Park to celebrate Juneteenth. By 1898, 30,000 gathered at Booker T. Washington Park in Texas on Juneteenth.

What true grit has been shown by the descendants of an enslaved people. What a grand American holiday to continue to celebrate today.

Many years after writing his song, now a lawyer, novelist, Broadway musical writer, professor and huge cultural figure, James Weldon Johnson reflected on “Lift Every Voice and Sing”: “Our New York publisher … made mimeographed copies for us, and the song was taught to and sung by a chorus of five hundred colored school children. Shortly afterwards my brother and I moved away from Jacksonville to New York, and the song passed out of our minds. But the school children of Jacksonville kept singing it; they went off to other schools and sang it; they became teachers and taught it to other children. Within twenty years it was being sung over the South. … The lines of this song repay me in an elation, almost of exquisite anguish, whenever I hear them sung.”