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America today celebrates Juneteenth, a commemoration both of the horrors of our original sin, slavery, and of its end.
The holiday traces to victorious Union Gen. Gordon Granger’s June 19, 1865 order putting the Emancipation Proclamation (issued in January 1863) into full legal effect across Texas, freeing all the state’s remaining slaves.
The celebration has since spread, culminating in federal recognition in 2021 by President Joe Biden.
So what, as a holiday for all Americans — a fully national occasion as Independence Day and Thanksgiving are — should we make of it?
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.
As the great American sociologist and civil-rights warrior W.E.B. Du Bois said in 1905,
We will not be satisfied to take one jot or tittle less than our full manhood rights.
