WSDW'S NEWSLETTER
JULY, 2020
REPRESENTATIVE JOHN LEWIS DIED JUST DAYS AFTER HAVING VISITED THE BLACK LIVES MATTER PLAZA! BELOW HEAR HIS LAST ESSAY TO US ALL!!
JOHN ROBERT LEWIS was a life long civil rights leader and US Representative from the State of Georgia's 5th congressional district from 1987, until his death in 2020 from pancreatic cancer. He walked with Martin Luther King in his youth and throughout his adulthood he continued to fight our current demons!!
Above: Photo of John Lewis seeing only days before his death the BLM sign on the street of the Black Lives Matter Plaza.
To the Right: The Actor Morgan Freeman greeting Civil Right Activist and Georgia's US Representative John Lewis.
The above video: The actor Morgan Freeman reads (at the request of the late, great and treasured national civil rights hero John Lewis on the day of his funeral) Mr Lewis's essay “Together, You Can Redeem the Soul of Our Nation.”
DEMOCRATS VIRTUAL PHONE BANK!!
If you're wanting to do something to ensure VP Biden becomes President or even if you simply want to ensure Trump loses the Presidency, those attending the last 34th LD meeting, were made aware of something you can do right in your home to help. Participate in the Democrats Virtual Phone Bank!!
FAQ's You can use a landline, a mobile phone or Google voice (this would mask your personal phone number). All three will work. It can be done from home, you need not be a member of the 34th to participate and you can participate via the 34th LD or the State Democratic Party. Either is just fine!!
From the 34th's Communication Chair:
You can sign up directly for shifts: https://www.wa-democrats.org/organTizingevents/?results=True&date_start=07-09-2020&event_type=210590# or To learn more and talk to us before signing up: https://bit.ly/34thPhoneBank
Anything you can do to help would be greatly appreciated!!
JUNE, 2020
What Is Juneteenth?
by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. | Originally posted on The Root
The First Juneteenth
“The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.” —General Orders, Number 3; Headquarters District of Texas, Galveston, June 19, 1865
When Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger issued the above order, he had no idea that, in establishing the Union Army’s authority over the people of Texas, he was also establishing the basis for a holiday, “Juneteenth” (“June” plus “nineteenth”), today the most popular annual celebration of emancipation from slavery in the United States. After all, by the time Granger assumed command of the Department of Texas, the Confederate capital in Richmond had fallen; the “Executive” to whom he referred, President Lincoln, was dead; and the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery was well on its way to ratification.
But Granger wasn’t just a few months late. The Emancipation Proclamation itself, ending slavery in the Confederacy (at least on paper), had taken effect two-and-a-half years before, and in the interim, close to 200,000 black men had enlisted in the fight. So, formalities aside, wasn’t it all over, literally, but the shouting?
It would be easy to think so in our world of immediate communication, but as Granger and the 1,800 bluecoats under him soon found out, news traveled slowly in Texas. Whatever Gen. Robert E. Lee had surrendered in Virginia, the Army of the Trans-Mississippi had held out until late May, and even with its formal surrender on June 2, a number of ex-rebels in the region took to bushwhacking and plunder.
That’s not all that plagued the extreme western edge of the former Confederate states. Since the capture of New Orleans in 1862, slave owners in Mississippi, Louisiana and other points east had been migrating to Texas to escape the Union Army’s reach. In a hurried re-enactment of the original Middle Passage, more than 150,000 slaves had made the trek west, according to historian Leon Litwack in his book Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery. As one former slave he quotes recalled, ” ‘It looked like everybody in the world was going to Texas.’ ”
When Texas fell and Granger dispatched his now famous order No. 3, it wasn’t exactly instant magic for most of the Lone Star State’s 250,000 slaves. On plantations, masters had to decide when and how to announce the news — or wait for a government agent to arrive — and it was not uncommon for them to delay until after the harvest. Even in Galveston city, the ex-Confederate mayor flouted the Army by forcing the freed people back to work, as historian Elizabeth Hayes Turner details in her comprehensive essay, “Juneteenth: Emancipation and Memory,” in Lone Star Pasts: Memory and History in Texas.
Those who acted on the news did so at their peril. As quoted in Litwack’s book, former slave Susan Merritt recalled, ” ‘You could see lots of niggers hangin’ to trees in Sabine bottom right after freedom, ’cause they cotch ’em swimmin’ ‘cross Sabine River and shoot ’em.’ ” In one extreme case, according to Hayes Turner, a former slave named Katie Darling continued working for her mistress another six years (She ” ‘whip me after the war jist like she did ‘fore,’ ” Darling said).
Hardly the recipe for a celebration — which is what makes the story of Juneteenth all the more remarkable. Defying confusion and delay, terror and violence, the newly “freed” black men and women of Texas, with the aid of the Freedmen’s Bureau (itself delayed from arriving until September 1865), now had a date to rally around. In one of the most inspiring grassroots efforts of the post-Civil War period, they transformed June 19 from a day of unheeded military orders into their own annual rite, “Juneteenth,” beginning one year later in 1866.
” ‘The way it was explained to me,’ ” one heir to the tradition is quoted in Hayes Turner’s essay, ” ‘the 19th of June wasn’t the exact day the Negro was freed. But that’s the day they told them that they was free … And my daddy told me that they whooped and hollered and bored holes in trees with augers and stopped it up with [gun] powder and light and that would be their blast for the celebration.’ ”
