Juneteenth

I started reading Juneteenth this week but haven't gotten very far yet.  Not that it is a hard book to read.  It just wasn't what I expected.  For some reason, I had gotten it into my head that it was about the Tulsa massacre of 1921, but the story is set in the 1950s with a huge Black minister leading members of his Arkansas congregation to Washington to confront a Senator who had turned his back on his Southern origins and was now vehemently racist in his beliefs.  The senator is gunned down during a speech, in which he suffers from hallucinations throughout.  As he lies on his hospital bed, he calls for the Black minister, much to the surprise of everyone, and we start to learn the relationship between the two men that stretched back to the 1920s.

Essentially, the novel is about what Juneteenth meant to Ellison.  He wrote copiously on the theme for many years but never could quite finish the book.  It lay in over 2000 pages upon his death in 1994, and an editor, John Callahan, went through the painstaking process of culling the pages down to their essential core and releasing a volume in 1999.  It would be nice to have an annotated version of the novel, as there is so much here that one not privy to Ellison's thoughts is left to assume a lot of things.

It is an event that has essentially slipped under the radar screen.  As far as I know, Texas has been the only state to honor the occasion with a state holiday, although now other cities and states are following suit.  There is a widespread call to make it a national holiday, as June 19, 1865, represented the actual end to slavery, not the Emancipation Proclamation.  No holiday marking that major event either.  When Lincoln issued that proclamation, he exempted the border states that had stayed in the Union.  Texas being the last Southern state to be subjugated by the Union army, led to the final order by General Gordon Granger in Galveston that all Blacks were now Freedmen.

President Obama issued a statement each and every year of his administration honoring the occasion, starting in 2009.  Yet, for some strange reason no one in the Trump administration was aware of this, or if they were didn't choose to inform their president of the significance of this date, so that he ended up looking like a total fool when he found out that the day scheduled for his first official re-election rally was on a venerated day and in a place notorious for a massacre that took place in early June, nearly 100 years ago.

The Tulsa massacre sent shock waves throughout the country and still resonates today because it was the most horrific example of white on black violence in America.  An entire black community was held under siege by the white majority for several days after a black shoeshine boy allegedly assaulted a white elevator girl at the Drexel Building.  The young man was apprehended immediately, but the white community felt such outrage that it decided to ransack Greenwood, killing an estimated 75 to 300 Blacks and injuring countless others.  Whites also looted all the businesses and left much of the community in ashes.  It wasn't until 2001 that an official race riot commission was established to determine the full extent of the damage.

Eric Foner and Carol Anderson were on Amanpour last night and he said that someone in the Trump administration deliberately planned this rally on this date, even if he doubts Trump was aware of the events that took place long ago.  This isn't the first time, Foner said.  He noted that Reagan launched his 1980 campaign in the town of Philadelphia, Mississippi, the same place where three freedom summer campaign workers, hoping to register Black voters, were murdered by the Klu Klux Klan in 1964.

These places are deeply symbolic in American history and Republicans have sought to exploit them ever since using the Southern strategy to their full advantage.  Starting in 1964, the Republicans have effectively been able to cleave Dixiecrats from the Democratic Party over the issue of race.  Goldwater was the first to exploit it, although he lost in a landslide to President Lyndon Johnson.  Nixon used it to full advantage in 1968, squeaking out a narrow victory over Hubert Humphrey.  By Reagan's time, Dixiecrats completely turned against their former party and joined the Republican Party virtually in full, so that today it has become virtually the "Solid South" in the Republicans' electoral map for maintaining control of the Senate and regaining the White House in 2016.

Add to that all the voter suppression acts that have been signed by conservative governors throughout the country, most notoriously in Georgia and Florida, where the Republican hold has been slipping in recent years.  This brings us right back to the days of Old Jim Crow, where the party in power seeks to maintain control by disenfranchising a large cross section of voters on the flimsiest of grounds.  Something, Ralph Ellison was well aware of when he first started his grand novel in the 1950s.

Of course, Republicans today like to blame all the ills of the past on the Democrats.  I saw one naive conservative friend on facebook calling for an end to the Democratic Party since it was responsible for slavery.  She like many other registered Republicans are blissfully unaware of the transitions that have took place in the political parties since the Civil War, and why Blacks and all other minorities now vote overwhelmingly Democratic, not Republican.

Ellison was well aware of this too by the 1990s as he had seen this metamorphosis first hand.  Many political historians say the turning point was 1960, when Vice-President Nixon refused to reach out to Coretta Scott King when her husband was imprisoned in Atlanta.  No one knew if Martin Luther King Jr. would survive that ordeal.  Senator Kennedy reached out to her by phone and offered his assurances.  While Blacks had been voting Democratic for decades, they all but turned their backs on the Republican Party from this point onward.  Ironic, given that it had been the Republican Party, led by Abraham Lincoln, that had given them their freedom.

For the post-Civil Rights Republicans it didn't matter.  Looking at the demographic map of the country there were far more disgruntled Whites to be taken advantage of, although Republicans still like to recall that without their help President Johnson would have never gotten the Civil Rights Act passed in Congress.  Some even go so far as to claim the Act as their own.

You can't have it both ways though.  Republicans can't demand that we allow all these Confederate statues to stand and Confederate flag to be flown over public buildings and raceways, yet claim to be pro-Civil Rights.  This adoption of the infamous Stars and Bars came long after the Civil War, and represented a victory of sorts over Reconstruction.  By the early 20th century, most southern states had adopted the Stars and Bars into their state flag.  At the same time they had imposed Jim Crow laws designed to suppress the Black population and make sure government was run by Whites.  The KKK rose in prominence during this time, and statues honoring Confederate generals popped up all over the South.  How can you simultaneously blame Democrats for Jim Crow legislation and the suppression of Blacks and hold onto these symbols of repression?

Well, Republicans love to tell you it is part of history, but obviously a history they don't fully understand.  It was plainly clear most had no idea what Juneteenth was until protesters and the media called their attention to it.  Now, their president says he deserves credit for making the event "very famous."  I'm sure he will have a lot to say about it at his rally in Tulsa tonight.