By Tabitha Evans Moore | EDITOR & PUBLISHER

As I made breakfast this morning, my mother asked if the banks were closed for Juneteenth. When I told her they were, she paused.

“What is Juneteenth all about,” she asked. “I know it has something to do with emancipation in the U.S.”

As I gave her the summary, it struck me that not everyone fully understands the weight of this day. It’s not just about throwing up a “Happy Juneteenth” meme and calling it a day. Juneteenth is a day of collective mourning around the truth that justice delayed is justice denied.

To understand its underpinnings, one must go back to January 1, 1863 — the day that then President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, legally freeing all enslaved Black Americans.

Juneteenth, short for June nineteenth, marks the day over two years later when Union General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas — an area held as Confederate territory — to announce to its Black citizens that they were free.

That’s right. Give that a moment to sink in. Freedom was the law, but for those Black Americans it was as if the Emancipation Proclamation did not exist.

But why? Because Texas slave owners refused to obey the new law and there were not enough Union troops to enforce it until the Civil War ended. Slaveholders willfully withheld the news to exploit labor for as many cotton planting seasons as they could get away with, and those in power upheld the lie because it personally benefited them.

The regional holiday started the very next year marked by community gatherings, prayer services, parades, and festivals. It wasn’t until 155 years later that President Joe Biden signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act into law — marking it as a federal holiday.

Slavery is not dead in America

I often try to imagine what it must have felt like to be enslaved. I never manage it. I live as a white, Southern woman, and I am not confused about the privilege that brings. If I am in distress, people show up. If someone raised a hand to me, protectors would come running. No one has ever ripped a family member from my arms.

I cannot fathom how I might feel if another person controlled my every move. I also cannot imagine how I would feel if I learned I’d been freed over 900 days ago, and no one bothered to tell me.

Juneteenth asks us to set ourselves aside and name the gap between law and action, between promise and delivery, between knowing what is right and doing what is right. Yes, as a society, we can take comfort in how far we have come as it relates to our Black brothers and sisters, but the system of exploitation and oppression still hums just below the surface.

Slavery is not dead in America — not when many of our citizens work 40 hours a week for exploitative wages that cannot buy food or shelter. Not when for-profit prisons are full of incarcerated laborers working for pennies. The plantations still exist; we’ve just given them W-2s and called it capitalism.

One could argue that justice is still delayed.

It’s about freeing the truth.

Juneteenth is more than just an extra day off from work. It is a day to reflect on what it means to be totally free and have equal access to the American ideal of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Those are beautiful words but the actions of some in our society don’t match them. It’s the contradiction of an America that says one thing but does another.

It is a day to ask why we ask our marginalized citizens to just wait a little bit longer while the majority catches up to the idea that “all men (and women) are created equal.” It is a day to self-reflect on why those individuals should trust the system, when it has already proven unreliable.

We all like to think that we have evolved, and many of us have. But the hateful roots of racism still exist in America and one need look no further than at the wave of book banning, and history whitewashing that is currently taking place across the U.S. for proof of that. If slavery and racism were truly over, we would not still be fighting about who gets to tell the truth about it.

Juneteenth isn’t just about freeing the enslaved. It is also about freeing the truth and admitting that despite our current hearts, the roots of it remain — sometimes in our own families.

Over a year ago, a friend researching genealogy for a cemetery restoration project showed me an 1850 U.S. Census for Moore County record that stopped me cold. One of my ancestors was listed — followed by a group of unnamed individuals, identified only by age and sex. That’s when I realized my family had once owned slaves, and I burst into tears.

I had always seen slavery as something that happened to other people. But there it was, staring back at me from my own family tree. It haunted me for weeks.

Am I guilty of those crimes against humanity? No. Were my ancestors doing anything out of the norm for the time? Of course not. But that does not lessen the moral weight of it to me.

I cannot go back and change the past, but I can recognize it, and then do everything in my power to improve the future. Silence kept the Black citizens of Galveston enslaved for over nine hundred days than were necessary, and now is not a time to keep quiet about injustice wherever you encounter it. •

About The Lynchburg Times
The Lynchburg Times is an independent, woman-owned newspaper rooted in the heart of southern middle Tennessee. Led by a Tulane-educated journalist with over two decades of experience covering this region, we shine a light on the people, politics, and cultural pulse of a changing South. From breaking news to slow storytelling, we believe local journalism should inform, empower, and preserve what makes this place unique. Supported by readers and community partners, we’re proud to be part of the new Southern narrative – one story at a time. [Support us here.]