Latest news with #Reconstruction
Los Angeles Times
17 hours ago
- Politics
- Los Angeles Times
California hopes law from bloody era of U.S. history can rein in Trump's use of troops
California's fight to rein in President Trump's deployment of troops to Los Angeles hinges on a 19th century law with a a blood-soaked origin and a name that seems pulled from a Spaghetti Western. In a pivotal ruling this week, Senior U.S. District Judge Charles R. Breyer ordered the federal government to hand over evidence to state authorities seeking to prove that the actions of troops in Southern California violate the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which forbids soldiers from enforcing civilian laws. 'How President Trump has used and is using the federalized National Guard and the Marines since deploying them at the beginning of June is plainly relevant to the Posse Comitatus Act,' Breyer wrote Wednesday in his order authorizing 'limited expedited discovery.' The Trump administration objected to the move and has already once gotten a sweeping Breyer ruling that would've limited White House authority over the troops overturned by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. This time, the Northern District of California judge made clear he would 'only allow discovery as to the Posse Comitatus Act' — signaling what could be the state's last stand battle to prevent Marines and National Guard forces from participating in immigration enforcement. The Posse Comitatus Act dates back to the aftermath of the Civil War when the American government faced violent resistance to its efforts to rebuild Southern state governments and enforce federal law following the abolition of slavery. The text of the law itself is slight, its relevant section barely more than 60 words. Yet when it was enacted, it served as the legal epitaph to Reconstruction — and a preface to Jim Crow. 'It has these very ignoble beginnings,' said Mark P. Nevitt, a law professor at Emory University and one of the country's foremost experts on the statute. Before the Civil War, the U.S. military was kept small, in part to avoid the kinds of abuses American colonists suffered under the British. Authorities back then could marshal a crew of civilians, called a posse comitatus, to assist them, as sometimes happened in California during the Gold Rush. States also had militias that could be called up by the president to pad out the army in wartime. But law enforcement by the U.S. military was rare and deeply unpopular. Historians have said the use of soldiers to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act — which saw escaped slaves hunted down and returned to the South — helped spark the Civil War. In recent weeks, the Trump administration has used constitutional maneuvers invented to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act to justify using troops to round up immigrants. Experts said leaders from the antebellum South demanded similar enforcement of the law. 'The South was all for posse comitatus when it came to the Fugitive Slave Act,' said Josh Dubbert, a historian at the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library in Ohio. But by the time Congress sent federal troops to begin Reconstruction in earnest in 1867, the landscape was very different. After white rioters razed Black neighborhoods in Memphis and mobs of ex-Confederate soldiers massacred Black demonstrators in New Orleans in the spring of 1866, 'most of the South [was] turned into military districts,' said Jacob Calhoun, a professor of American history at Wabash College and an expert on Reconstruction. 'Most scholars, let alone the American public, do not understand the scale of racial violence during Reconstruction,' Calhoun said. 'They only send these troops in after unimaginable levels of violence.' At the polls, Black voters were met by white gangs seeking to prevent them from casting ballots. 'For most of American history, the idea of an American army intervening in elections is a nightmare,' Calhoun said. '[Posse Comitatus] is reemphasizing this longstanding belief but for more nefarious purposes.' The Posse Comitatus language was tucked into an appropriations bill by Southern Democrats after their party won control of Congress in the election of 1876 — 'possibly the most violent election in American history,' Calhoun said. Historians say white lawmakers in the post-war South sought to enshrine their ability to keep Black men from voting by barring federal forces from bolstering the local militias that protected them. 'Once they're in control of Congress, they want to cut the appropriations for the army,' Dubbert said. 'They attach this amendment to [their appropriations bill] which is the Posse Comitatus Act.' The bill won support from some Republicans, who resented the use of federalized troops to put down the Railroad Strike of 1877 — the first national labor strike in the U.S. 'It is a moment in which white Northern congressmen surrender the South back to ex-Confederates,' Calhoun said. 'With the Posse Comitatus Act, racial violence becomes the norm.' Yet the statute itself largely vanished from memory, little used for most of the next century. 'The Posse Comitatus Act was forgotten for about 75 years, from after Reconstruction to basically the 1950s, when a defense lawyer made a challenge to a piece of evidence that the Army had obtained,' Nevitt said. 'The case law is [all] after World War II.' Those cases have largely turned on troops who arrest, search, seize or detain civilians — 'the normal thing the LAPD does on a daily basis,' Nevitt said. The courts have stood by the bedrock principle that military personnel should not be used to enforce the law against civilians, he said, except in times of rebellion or other extreme scenarios. 'Our nation was forged in large part because the British military was violating the civil rights of colonists in New England,' Nevitt said. 'I really can't think of a more important question than the military's ability to use force against Americans.' Yet, the law is full of loopholes, scholars said — notably in relation to use of the National Guard. Department of Justice has argued Posse Comitatus does not apply to the military's current actions in Southern California — and even if it did, the soldiers deployed there haven't violated the law. It also claimed the 9th Circuit decision endorsing Trump's authority to call up troops rendered the Posse Comitatus issue moot. Some experts feel California's case is strong. 'You literally have military roaming the streets of Los Angeles with civilian law enforcement,' said Shilpi Agarwal, legal director of the ACLU of Northern California, 'That's exactly what the [act] is designed to prevent.' But Nevitt was more doubtful. Even if Breyer ultimately rules that Trump's troops are violating the law and grants the injunction California is seeking, the 9th Circuit will almost certainly strike it down, he said. 'It's going to be an uphill battle,' the attorney said. 'And if they find a way to get to the Supreme Court, I see the Supreme Court siding with Trump as well.'
Boston Globe
a day ago
- Boston Globe
Ten years after tragedy, a historic Black church lives on
The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 26 episode of the 'Say More' podcast. James Dao: I'm Jim Dao. Welcome to 'Say More.' Kevin Sack is a longtime reporter who spent much of his award-winning career writing investigative and long-term narrative pieces for The New York Times. Then in 2015, he helped cover one of the most horrific massacres in recent US history, the killing of nine parishioners who were attending Bible study at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. The story launched Sack on what would turn into a 10 year project to document the history of Mother Emanuel, one of the oldest and most influential black churches in America. The book, which is out now, explores stories of the enslaved and emancipated black people who created and sustained the church against all odds in a bastion of the confederacy. It is also an extraordinarily detailed history of black Charleston from before the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement. The book also grapples with eternal questions of forgiveness and resilience a decade after this terrible tragedy. I'll just note here that Kevin and I are old friends from our days at the New York Times. Kevin Sack, welcome to 'Say More.' So your book opens almost exactly a decade ago on June 17th, 2015, with a mass shooting at a church. Tell us about that church and what happened that night. Kevin Sack: The church is Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. It is the oldest AME church in the Southern United States, and has a remarkable history that goes back over 200 years. Now, it was first started in around 1817-1818 after really a subversive act, a withdrawal of thousands of African American Methodist from white-controlled, white-governed Methodist churches in Charleston to form something known as the African Church, which was somewhat short-lived. Then it reformed as Emanuel in 1865 when AME missionaries followed Union troops into Charleston as the Civil War was closing and started this church back up. It's called Mother Emanuel because it then seeded churches all over South Carolina and eventually the South. On the night of June 17th, 2015, 14 individuals, most of them adults but several children, were at Bible study. It was a Wednesday night. That's when bible study always takes place. This night, the Bible study was delayed by an hour or so because there had been a business meeting beforehand called a quarterly conference. Because it's going late, a lot of folks actually left before the Bible study. This could have been a much more horrific incident, but 14 remained, most of them in the fellowship hall itself, where the Bible study was taking place. At some point, the door opens up and a man named Dylann Roof, 21 years old, walks in. He's got a waist pack around his midsection. And, he's invited in, welcomed by the ministers and takes a seat. He is handed a study guide and a Bible and sits silently for roughly 45 minutes through the Bible study until everyone's eyes are closed in benediction, at which point he unzips the waist pack, removes a Glock and starts firing somewhat indiscriminately. He starts with the pastor, shoots him multiple times and then proceeds to walk around the room as old church ladies are diving under tables and assassinates them one by one. There winds up being several survivors. One of them, Polly Sheppard, is confronted by the killer. She's under a table and she looks up and sees the barrel of his gun. Pointing at her face, she's praying. He asks her if he has shot her yet. She answers 'No' and he says, 'Well, I'm going to leave you here to tell the story.' The other adult survivor in the room was Felicia Sanders, who was there with her granddaughter and her son. Her son was in his mid twenties, a recent college graduate. He's already been shot, and she is hugging the granddaughter so tightly under the table that she thinks she might suffocate the child. Dao: Wow. These were eventually categorized as hate crimes. Do I have that right? Sack: That's right. Dao: This person, Dylann Roof, self-described as a white supremacist and quite proud of that. Sack: Correct. This was his intent. He made it exceedingly clear, both as he was firing and in his initial interview with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) after he was arrested the next day, that his purpose was to incite racial strife. What he really wanted was to incite some sort of race war. Dao: Did you ever talk to him or have any sort of significant contact with him and did you learn anything more about him as a person? Sack: Yeah, well, I covered his trial which was immensely frustrating for those of us who had hoped that it might provide some insight into who he was and how he had developed his white supremacist views. And it was deeply unsatisfying in that way because Roof, you may remember, wound up hijacking his own defense. He was intent on demonstrating that he was purposeful that night, that this had been premeditated and planned, that he wanted it to be known that he was a zealot, not a lunatic. And so he took over his own defense for the explicit purpose of denying his own lawyers the opportunity to present psychiatric evidence that might persuade even a single juror that he did not deserve the death penalty. In addition to watching the trial and getting some sense of him there, we also exchanged a few letters. He was on death row at this point, as he remains in Terre Haute, Indiana, at a federal penitentiary. He's now one of three federal death row inmates along with the Boston Marathon bomber and the Tree of Life Synagogue shooter in Pittsburgh. In these letters, I was seeking very specific answers to specific questions about the timeline of the evening, about his preparation, about what he understood about Emanuel and its history going in. I think he saw the exchange more as an opportunity to exert power in a new relationship. There was lots of antagonistic banter back and forth. He did acknowledge once again that he was utterly remorseless. Dao: I wanted to get you to talk a little bit about the church's pastor, Clementa Pinckney, who did die. He sounded extraordinary and charismatic, both as a minister and a politician. Sack: He was a remarkable prodigy, both in the church and in politics. He was called to preach at age 13 while walking through his childhood chapel in Ridgeland, South Carolina. He says he literally heard the voice of God calling him to preach, needless to say, took it quite seriously and acted upon it. He was known as a kid for wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase to middle school. He was that much about business even at that age. Then he winds up running for and winning office to the state legislature. He became the youngest African American to ever win election to South Carolina's legislature. And at the time of the shooting, he was serving his fourth term in the state senate as a Democrat in Republican, South Carolina. Therefore, he didn't have huge influence in the general assembly, but certainly advocated with great vigor for his district, which was one of the most poverty stricken in the state. Dao: I'm gonna ask you to now jump back in time. This is a very old church, dates back to the heart of the Confederacy when Charleston was a key center for the slave trade. The fact that free men and women, as well as I think slave parishioners could pull together the beginnings of this church back in that pre-war era is kind of a miracle in a way. Sack: It was just an incredibly bold act for the times, which again was around 1817 or 1818 when they withdrew from white Methodist churches and formed their own congregation. The leadership of that effort was from free people of color, but the enslaved were the majority of the membership. And, so yes, when the church forms the white population of Charleston, the white leadership of Charleston instantly sees it as a threat. There are mass arrests and jailings. The church's leaders are jailed and do some time. Then in 1822, there was an insurrection plot in Charleston. It's come to be known as the Denmark Vesey Conspiracy, named for the free person of color, a carpenter who actually had bought his way out of slavery after hitting the lottery. And Vesey, extensively organizes this plot. It's uncovered before it happens, and scores of men are arrested. Thirty five wind up being led to the gallows after trial and hung and almost half of those, I think 17 of the 35 wind up having some sort of association with the church. So in my view, it almost felt like the church itself was on trial and that they were really the target of the investigation that the authorities initiated. Because I think the place was seen as such a threat in the aftermath of all this. A month after the trials end, the church is dismantled board by board under order of the authorities and the leaders of the church are exiled under threat of criminal prosecution. Dao: Wow. So my sense is that the Denmark Vesey affair really kind of set the church back. It was harshly repressed for years and then you have the Civil War which then is an opening, right? The church can really sort of emerge during Reconstruction. Is it then sort of like a steady path of growth toward the civil rights movement? And the church as you came to know it in 2015? Sack: Yeah, I think it's very much a two steps forward, one step back kind of progress. And when you look at the church's history over time, it is very much one of suppression and repression followed by resistance. We see that all the way through 2015 when this white supremacist walks in the door and takes out the church's leadership and response. There has been resistance of various kinds both communal in terms of the way that the city responded and within the church and within the hearts of members, including any number who found a way to forgive this remorseless killer. And I argue in the book that that in itself is a form of resistance. Dao: We're gonna take a quick break and we'll be back with Kevin Sack. Kevin, you just mentioned the theme of forgiveness. As you know, I was an editor on the National Desk of the New York Times at the time of the Mother Emanuel shootings and I remember being shocked when at a nationally televised bail hearing for Dylann Roof, several relatives of the victims said they forgave him for his despicable violence. Tell us about your reaction to that stunning moment of grace and what did you learn about why those families said what they said? Sack: It really drove this whole exploration to some extent, what happened in the courtroom that day. Because yes, these five family members got up and expressed forgiveness of one form or another. They weren't all identical. Some went further than others. And in fact, even the night before, there had been a memorial service for one of the victims, Sharonda Singleton, and afterwards her son, Chris Singleton, an incredibly impressive young man, was asked by a British TV reporter how he was feeling. And he's standing next to his sister Camryn at the moment, and he says that there's nothing but love from our family right now, and we've already forgiven him. Now, none of the folks that spoke the next day had heard that or seen that, they didn't even know they were gonna be asked to speak at this bond hearing or afforded an opportunity by the judge to make a comment or two. And when I've interviewed all of them, they will tell you that it was utterly unpremeditated, unplanned, spontaneous. They describe it in mystical terms. It was 'God talking.' They were merely the vessels. Like everybody, I think I was simultaneously awestruck and befuddled by this. It seemed like the purest expression of Christianity that any of us had ever seen, much less imagined. I wanted to know where it came from. I thought about it and spoke to theologians and pastors. It occurred to me that what was really going on here was a form of release, because when you think about it, how else can you avoid being eaten alive from the insides by the fury and the rage and the insult? And so in that way, it seemed to me that forgiveness really was its own form of resistance. It was a way to reclaim agency by people who had been robbed of it, by this killer. The one thing that could not be taken from them was their ability to forgive. Dao: Talk a moment about the opposite view that you encountered in reporting out and researching this book. Clearly there were people within the church, within families you pointed out, and certainly within the African American community around the country who were sort of shocked by this and maybe not pleased, I guess would be fair to say. Could you describe that? Sack: Yeah, there are plenty of folks, including some of our brightest writers who asked in columns and essays immediately after this happened. 'Why is it always on black people to forgive? Why is it on them? They're not the problem here.' There certainly are family members who do not in any way forgive and would like to see Roof executed. And there are others who are frank about them being on a journey. And that path to forgiveness is not necessarily a direct one or an immediate one. They'll tell you that it sure would've helped a lot if he had shown some remorse. But it's very difficult for many people, and I think I'm one of them, to relate to that kind of grant of forgiveness for somebody who's not asking for it. Dao: So obviously you spent a lot of time in Charleston and then eventually moved there. You live there now. Could you talk a little bit about how the City of Charleston grappled with this in the aftermath and is it over this yet or is it still continuing to really shape that city now? Sack: Yeah, I don't think it'll ever get over it. It was a defining moment for the city in any number of ways, and what's happened in the last decade has been really interesting on a number of fronts. There were a variety of symbolic, but I would argue extremely meaningful, gestures made. In the aftermath of the shootings, the one that everybody remembers is the Confederate flag, that had flown either above or outside the state capitol in Columbia, South Carolina since the early 1960s as a direct affront to the quarter of the state's population that's African American, that finally came down. It took the assassination of a state senator to make it happen, but the Republican governor of South Carolina, Nikki Haley, at the time, and the Republican dominated legislature did finally move to bring the flag down. I think that mattered. It also mattered that the statue of John C. Calhoun, the great slavery defender, which had towered over Marion Square, Charleston Central Plaza for generations, again, as very much as a felt insult to those who walked beneath it, that was brought down by order of the mayor and the city council. On the fifth anniversary of the shootings, the city issued a resolution, apologizing for its role in slavery. Forty-six percent of all enslaved Africans who disembarked in North America, did so in the Port of Charleston. And interestingly, it was not a unanimous vote. There was considerable dissent. There are two pieces of legislation put before the general assembly, and in Columbia, that have gone nowhere. One is a hate crimes law. South Carolina is now one of two states without a hate crimes law. It was one of five at the time of the shootings. Bills have been introduced every year and have gone nowhere. There was also legislation, and still is legislation, both on the federal level and the state level to close what became known as the Charleston Loophole, which was the short background check period for purchasing a weapon, which allowed Dylann Roof to buy his gun despite a prior drug arrest. So those things have gone nowhere. I'm regularly asked whether I think Charleston is a different place now than it was before, and I do think there was a Charleston before 2015 and a Charleston after 2015, much the same way that there was a New York before and after 9/11, and I would assume a Boston before and after the marathon bombing. And I think it's a softer place. I think it's more self-reflective about race in particular. And I think a lot of conversations have started, that would not have happened beforehand. I know that I've been part of many of them. Dao: So you made this transition from being a newspaper reporter to being a historian, from covering news stories to spending lots and lots of days in archives. And you've devoted 10 years to this project, which has a remarkable result. What do you think you've taken away from this experience? And how are you thinking about things going forward from here? Are you gonna remain a historian? Sack: It might be a slight overstatement to call me a historian at this point. I remain a journalist with an interest in history, but I've certainly gained a lot of respect and a certain amount of practice, I guess, at the historian's craft. It's very different from journalism. I mean, yes, I spent lots of time in musty archives going through old bound volumes and, I think that we, as journalists, need to do more of this. I recognize that we don't often have the time or resources or capability to do it, and that's where nonfiction writers and historians do and should step in. But it was remarkable to me, how much wrong history I found and yeah, obviously what happens is, it gets written and then it gets repeated and it eventually solidifies into fact, or perceived truth, whether it is actual truth or not. Dao: Kevin Sack is author of Listen to more 'Say More' episodes at Kara Mihm of the Globe staff contributed to this report. James Dao can be reached at
Yahoo
20-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Editorial: Why Juneteenth matters — The promise of freedom, liberty and equality must still be redeemed
Two-and-a-half years after Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, the enslaved people of Texas learned — via the victorious Union Army — that they were liberated. It was June 19, 1865, when U.S. Maj. General Gordon Granger issued an order, reading: 'The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages.' That 'absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property,' of course, while easy to assert on paper, has been devilishly difficult in the 160 intervening years to make real. In Reconstruction, Southern whites brutally kept freed Black people down. During Jim Crow, segregation and voting suppression and racism made the promise of fairness little more than a taunt. Even since the civil rights movement, which culminated in sweeping federal legislation prohibiting discrimination, the pernicious virus of bias infects too many institutions. Even if every last American were enlightened — which is most certainly not the case — the accumulated weight of generations of bigotry, much of it written into our laws, still weighs on the nation. Wealth and power are tightly intertwined, and the median white household has a net worth 10 times the median Black household, a disparity that adds up to more than $10 trillion. There are many reasons for this, some of which flow from individuals' decisions — we don't for a moment suggest that to be Black in America is to be invariably destined to a life of poverty and oppression — but the lasting burden of decade after decade after decade of injustice still makes shoulders ache. On Juneteenth, we celebrate those who carry that weight and dedicate ourselves to building a fairer future. _____
Atlantic
19-06-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
The Hollowness of This Juneteenth
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Five years ago, as the streets ran hot and the body of George Floyd lay cold, optimistic commentators believed that America was on the verge of a breakthrough in its eternal deliberation over the humanity of Black people. For a brief moment, perhaps, it seemed as if the ' whirlwinds of revolt,' as Martin Luther King Jr. once prophesied, had finally shaken the foundations of the nation. In 2021, in the midst of this 'racial reckoning,' as it was often called, Congress passed legislation turning Juneteenth into 'Juneteenth National Independence Day,' a federal holiday. Now we face the sober reality that our country might be further away from that promised land than it has been in decades. Along with Memorial Day and Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Juneteenth became one of three federal holidays with explicit roots in Black history. Memorial Day was made a national observance in 1868 to honor soldiers felled during the Civil War, and was preceded by local celebrations organized by newly freed Black residents. The impetus for MLK Day came about with King's assassination exactly a century later, after which civil-rights groups and King's closest associates campaigned for the named holiday. Memorial Day and Martin Luther King Jr. Day both originated in times when the Black freedom struggle faced its greatest challenges. Juneteenth—an emancipation celebration popularized during Reconstruction—was codified during what purported to be a transformation in America's racial consciousness. But, like its predecessors, Juneteenth joined the federal-holiday ranks just as Americans also decided en masse that they were done with all that. The 1870s saw the radical promise of Reconstruction give way to Jim Crow; the 1960s gave way to the nihilism and race-baiting of the Nixonian and Reaganite years. In 2024, the election of Donald Trump to a second term signaled a national retreat from racial egalitarianism. In his first months as president, he has moved the country in that direction more quickly than many imagined he would. Trump has set fire to billions of dollars of contracts in the name of eliminating 'DEI,' according to the White House. His legislative agenda threatens to strip federal health care and disaster aid for populations that are disproportionately Black. The Department of Defense has defenestrated Black veterans in death, removing their names from government websites and restoring the old names of bases that originally honored Confederate officers. The Federal Aviation Administration plans to spend millions of dollars to investigate whether recruiting Black air-traffic controllers (among other minority groups) has caused more plane crashes. The Smithsonian and its constituents have come under attack for daring to present artifacts about slavery and segregation. Books about Black history are being disappeared from schools and libraries. The secretary of education has suggested that public-school lessons about the truth of slavery and Jim Crow might themselves be illegal. There were, perhaps, other possible outcomes after 2020, but they didn't come to pass. The Democratic Party harnessed King's whirlwinds of revolt to power its mighty machine, promising to transform America and prioritize racial justice. Corporations donned the mask of 'wokeness'; people sent CashApp 'reparations' and listened and learned. But the donations to racial-justice initiatives soon dried up. The party supported a war in Gaza that fundamentally undercut any claim to its moral authority, especially among many young Black folks who felt kinship with the Palestinians in their plight. When DEI emerged as a boogeyman on the far right, many corporate leaders and politicians started to slink away from previous commitments to equity. Democratic Party leadership underestimated the anti-anti-racism movement, and seemed to genuinely believe that earned racial progress would endure on its own. The backlash that anybody who'd studied history said would come came, and the country was unprepared. Trump and his allies spend a lot of time talking about indoctrination and banning DEI. But by and large, the campaign against 'wokeness' has always been a canard. The true quarries of Trump's movement are the actual policies and structures that made progress possible. Affirmative action is done, and Black entrance rates at some selective schools have already plummeted. Our existing federal protections against discrimination in workplaces, housing, health care, and pollution are being peeled back layer by layer. The 1964 Civil Rights Act might be a dead letter, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act is in perpetual danger of losing the last of its teeth. The Fourteenth Amendment itself stands in tatters. Five years after Democratic congresspeople knelt on the floor in kente cloth for nearly nine minutes, the holiday is all that really remains. This puts the oddness of today in stark relief. The purpose of Juneteenth was always a celebration of emancipation, of the Black community's emergence out of our gloomy past. But it was also an implicit warning that what had been done could be done again. Now millions of schoolchildren will enjoy a holiday commemorating parts of our history that the federal government believes might be illegal to teach them about. I once advocated for Juneteenth as a national holiday, on the grounds that the celebration would prompt more people to become familiar with the rich history of emancipation and Black folks' agency in that. But, as it turns out, transforming Juneteenth into 'Juneteenth National Independence Day' against the backdrop of the past few years of retrenchment simply creates another instance of hypocrisy. What we were promised was a reckoning, whatever that meant. What we got was a day off.
Time Magazine
19-06-2025
- Politics
- Time Magazine
Juneteenth Reminds Us That the Fight for Freedom Is Far From Over
Juneteenth represents the long-delayed freedom of enslaved Black people in the United States. But Juneteenth isn't just a day to celebrate. For me, it's a marker—a moment to remember what came right after emancipation. Because every time Black people in this country have pushed forward toward freedom and justice, something has stepped up to push back. That pushback is the unfinished business of American democracy, and it's playing out right now. After the Civil War, the promise of Reconstruction was real. Newly-freed Black people voted, ran for office, built institutions, and claimed their rights. But the backlash was swift and violent. The Ku Klux Klan wasn't just a fringe group—it was an organized force, often aided by local power structures, meant to terrorize Black communities and preserve white supremacy. Klan members and others didn't just attack in the streets; they infiltrated sheriffs' offices, courts, and local governments. Their ideology seeped into institutions designed to protect justice. Reconstruction was ultimately undermined by this collusion—laws without enforcement, rights without protection. That same pattern is echoing today. Investigations have revealed that hundreds of individuals affiliated with extremist groups—like the Oath Keepers and Three Percenters—have served in law enforcement or the military. Members of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys were convicted for their roles in the January 6 insurrection. Pardons have been granted and these repeated public calls for clemency have sent a message: some groups can act with impunity. Today, a long tradition of white supremacist ideology undermines public safety and provides permission for violence. It's important to distinguish between white nationalism and white supremacy. White nationalism is an organized, ideological push for a white-only nation—groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers fit this mold. White supremacy is the broader system that maintains racial hierarchy and inequality through laws, culture, and institutions. White nationalists exploit and reinforce that system while posing a direct threat to democracy and multiracial belonging. White supremacist forces during Reconstruction used law and policy to strip Black people of newly gained rights. Today, white nationalist movements aim to reshape who belongs in America by targeting the most vulnerable. Their ideology isn't confined to rallies or fringe forums—it's embedded in policy agendas that echo past efforts to define citizenship narrowly and weaponize government systems to exclude. Nowhere is this clearer than in the realm of immigration enforcement. In recent months, large-scale immigration enforcement actions have devastated immigrant and refugee communities. These aren't just isolated policy decisions—they are calculated assaults on the rights that Americans have fought for over generations. When white nationalist-aligned forces attack birthright citizenship, they're not just targeting immigrants. They're threatening the 14th Amendment—a cornerstone of post-slavery constitutional protection that guards us all against second-class status. These attacks are connected. Immigration raids, voter suppression laws, and attacks on educational freedom are part of a broader effort to redraw the lines of who belongs in America and to weaponize citizenship as a tool of exclusion. It's a dangerous project that strikes at the heart of multiracial democracy. In response, business owners, faith leaders, and civil society groups have organized legal challenges, rapid-response networks, and public campaigns. These acts of resistance echo the original spirit of Juneteenth—not just surviving, but fighting back. But the danger doesn't end with extremist groups. The deeper threat lies in the systems that allow them to thrive—flawed hiring practices, opaque oversight, and policies that enable racial profiling and targeted enforcement. It's the machinery of mass incarceration, deportation, and over-policing which is still disproportionately aimed at Black and Brown communities. This is why Juneteenth matters beyond symbolism. It's a call to vigilance and collective power. The fight for Black freedom and dignity is fundamental to any functioning democracy. When Black people are free—when our rights are secure—everyone moves closer to a society of shared voice, safety, and belonging. Each of us has a role in this long, disciplined struggle. We must organize from the ground up. We must educate our communities, demand transparency, and build new systems rooted in justice—whether that means ending harmful immigration practices, exposing extremist ties in public agencies, or investing in alternatives to punitive policing. When white supremacy infiltrates law enforcement and federal agencies, it doesn't just harm those directly targeted—it undermines democracy itself. Defending democracy means rejecting that infiltration and choosing to build something better, together. So, as we mark Juneteenth this year, let's carry two truths: a clear-eyed understanding of history's hard lessons and a fierce commitment to action. The freedom Juneteenth commemorates was never a finish line. It was always a starting point. If we answer that call—if we organize with intention, demand accountability, and center the long arc of Black struggle to build one nation, with liberty and justice for all—we can build a future where Juneteenth's promise is fulfilled for every person who calls this country home.
