“Juneteenth is not a celebration of American perfection, because nations are never perfect. But it is a right and good celebration of our ongoing commitment to strive toward perfection, by admitting our sins and seeking to overcome them,” Dean Nelson of Human Coalition writes in World Opinions.
That’s a Christian message, and anyone who wants to turn his American toward the living God could take up this message and celebrate our national and spiritual freedom together. Let it carry over to July 4th so we can have a few weeks of it.
It will be many years before we fully overcome, if that is even possible. We still misunderstand the implications of Frederick Douglass’s speech, “What to the Slave Is the 4th?” delivered in 1852, if we even know it. We struggle to recognize different people as fully human, worthy of respect and of handling the consequences of their own actions. We struggle as a society to do what is right when it conflicts with what is comfortable. We don’t use the same language they did in 1852, but the ideas of our illiberal society overlap.
For the present, it is enough to affirm the equal manhood of the Negro race. Is it not astonishing that, while we are ploughing, planting and reaping, using all kinds of mechanical tools, erecting houses, constructing bridges, building ships, working in metals of brass, iron, copper, silver and gold; that, while we are reading, writing and cyphering, acting as clerks, merchants and secretaries, having among us lawyers, doctors, ministers, poets, authors, editors, orators and teachers; that, while we are engaged in all manner of enterprises common to other men, digging gold in California, capturing the whale in the Pacific, feeding sheep and cattle on the hill-side, living, moving, acting, thinking, planning, living in families as husbands, wives and children, and, above all, confessing and worshipping the Christian’s God, and looking hopefully for life and immortality beyond the grave, we are called upon to prove that we are men!
Michael Carter Jr. of Virginia is working to reclaim some of this list for a new generation of farmers. “Land is a forever asset. We acquired this land for $722.05 one hundred years ago.” And he’s farming 150 acres of it.