by Natasha Sistrunk Robinson

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Origin stories matter, for individuals, groups of people, and for nations.

They inform our sense of self; telling us what kind of people we believe we are,

what kind of nation we believe we live in. They usually carry, at least, a hope

that where we started might hold the key to where we are in the present.¹

Annette Gordon-Reed, On Juneteenth

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One thing that matters in this world, in America, in our Christian faith is the stories that we tell, the object of those stories, the purpose, the delivery of those stories and to what end. When I talk with leaders about the conditions of our nation, some people like to point to the facts, while others advocate or long to address the “real” issues. Yet, there is one hopeful, and sometimes subtle, element at work that we forget or ignore, and that is the stories we tell. When we declare a national holiday, we are telling a story about our history, the intersections of people groups, our values, and how our collective past informs our futures.  

Why is Juneteenth worth celebrating? As a Black girl from South Carolina, we did not grow up celebrating Juneteenth, and I do not recall hearing about it during my formative years. However, if travelers journey west to Texas, the story of Juneteenth is grafted into stories about Black enslavement, African American history and traditions, the history of indigenous peoples, the acquisition of Mexico, and the expansion of land now “owned” by the United States.    

The origin story of Juneteenth is that on June 19, 1865, slaves in Galveston Bay, Texas, finally received news that the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 had taken effect. The announcement came nearly two and a half years later. That’s two and a half more years of free labor, violence, murder, rape, starvation, hot field work, mental and emotional exhaustion, and the separation of families. Think about it for moment, most of us could barely gather ourselves through isolation, devastation, fear, and economic uncertainty of the recent global pandemic as we sat in our homes, with jobs that paid us for our labor, and family and friends who we sometimes got to live with or share time and space. The fact that we have this holiday at all is lamentable, because it reminds us that June 19, 1865, brought about an end to a form of enslavement that was horrific on a specific group of people in the United States.

What Kind of People We Believe We Are

Herein lies the tension of the history of the United States: how the story is told is based on who has the authority to tell the story. What do the storytellers want you to believe about themselves and the spaces they occupy in relation to the “other” or outsiders? The history of the United States confirms that Black folks, indigenous people, and Mexicans are among the groups who have always been identified as outsiders. This country was not built for us, and yet we love it and fight for it anyway. Much like the Israelites in Babylon, we are an exiled people in this land and we have learned to “seek the prosperity of the city where [God] has sent [us] into exile, and pray to the Lord in its behalf; for in its prosperity will be [our] prosperity” (Jeremiah 29:7, NASB).    

It is not lost on me that Juneteenth is sandwiched between the federal holidays of Memorial Day (the origins of which honored fallen confederate soldiers, but was officially declared a federal holiday by an act of Congress in 1971 to honor fallen military personnel from any war) and the Fourth of July (denoting the date in 1776 when the Declaration of Independence from Great Britain was approved by the Continental Congress). The true story of America is there were certain men who believed themselves white and divinely inspired people of faith, who rebelled, went to war with, and abandoned their own country to seek autonomy for themselves and build a different country in a land that was not their own. The wealth and the prosperity of that future country was the direct result of stolen land, genocide, broken treaties, kidnapping, and free labor from forced enslavement, destroying the lives and legacies of millions of God’s image bearers for centuries.

The story of exceptionalism, triumphalism, and Puritan faith reveals the kind of people we believe we are, and that’s the story that we still tell our kids in schools with the books that they are required to read, the documentaries they watch, the crafts that they make, the songs that they sing, and the school plays or performances that they participate in. We have all been socialized to believe the country’s story of our greatness and goodness. If we survey the history of the nation, there is some good.

What Kind of Nation We Believe We Live In

However, Juneteenth reminds us that the atrocity and the long-term systemic injustices of chattel slavery on the Black identity, Black psyche, Black bodies, Black education, Black wealth, Black equity, and the Black family is also very American. It forces us to consider the kind of nation we truly are versus the kind of nation we believe we live in. In the present time of banned books, uninformed discussions regarding “wokeness” and the use of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in schools, we must readily consider the American story — who we are versus the people and nation that we want to become.  

Juneteenth requires that we consider the enslaved story, the Black story, the Black history, for in the words of Langton Hughes,² “I, too, sing America” and one day “They’ll see how beautiful I am And be ashamed — .”  

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EDITOR'S NOTE: This article was written by Natasha Sistrunk Robinson and originally posted by Missio Alliance on June 19, 2023.

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Footnotes    

¹ Annette Gordon-Reed, On Juneteenth (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2021), 58.

² Langston Hughes, “I, Too, Sing America.” The Weary Blues. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926. Hughes’ famous poem is also known simply as “I, Too.” Accessed via https://americanliterature.com/author/langston-hughes/poem/i-too-sing-america.

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