What Is Juneteenth?
America today celebrates Juneteenth , a commemoration both of the horrors of the nation’s original sin, slavery, and of its end.
One all-too-fashionable idea is to treat black history and black life as somehow unapproachably apart from the larger history and larger life of this country. Yet that plainly stands as an obstacle to grasping the full meaning of this day. Indeed, as another great American thinker — Frederick Douglass — once urged his nation on Independence Day:
Though our society is still imperfect, though black Americans still face obstacles, the new separatism that seems dangerously close to reality — in which our different races, not our commonalities, will define us for good and all — willThe battle will continue. And the generations since those words were written stand not only on the shoulders of Douglass and Du Bois but also Harriet Tubman, Frances Harper, Booker T. Washington and countless others as they fight it.fight it.
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