Friday, June 18, 2021

Some progressive contrarian thought for Juneteenth

 

This article from The Forward What really happened on Juneteenth — and why it’s time for supremacists and their
sympathizers to surrender
  reminds me of a comment someone, who was something of a lefty-political operator in the 1960s and 70s, used to say about the idea of an MLK holiday.

She said: "It will just let some goo-goo liberals think that they have actually done something about race."

But  my mother would have appreciated the coda of this article:

[W]hat happened in Galveston on June 19, 1865, is that Gen. Granger arrived to forcibly liberate Black people from intransigent slaveholders who everyone knew were free.

That’s the true history of Juneteenth — along with a message that somehow has eluded the South and their white supremacist inheritors today:

You lost the damned war. Surrender already.