Free Indeed

“Free Indeed”

By

Bishop Melvin L. Maughmer, Jr.

SCRIPTURE: - John 8:36 “If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed”.

PRAYER: -

OPENING:- A little more than a year after the world watched the senseless, heartless, and cold blooded murder of George Floyd, heard of the shooting of Breanna Taylor during a botched raid by police, were shocked at the injustice that was done when Garrett Rolfe was reinstated as an Atlanta police officer after killing Rayshard Brooks in a Wendy’s parking lot. After the outburst of protests for racial justice sweeping across the nation, that sparked conversations on how to improve conditions for Black Lives on every front from the White House, news media, and in backyards around the BBQ, we just celebrated yesterday the 156th anniversary of one of its earliest liberation moments and thanks to President Biden signing it into law on Thursday now national holiday Juneteenth.

Juneteenth has been called many things over time Emancipation Day, Jubilee Day, Juneteenth National Freedom Day, Juneteenth Independence Day, and Black Independence Day. And yet despite the many different names, Juneteenth has faced competition from other emancipation holidays and has been unknown to many Americans.

SOME HISTORY: - Let me clear up first a misunderstanding, Juneteenth does not mark the end of slavery as many people believe - Juneteenth marks the day in 1865 when a group of enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, finally learned that they were free from slavery. This literally was almost two-and-a-half years after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, which put an end to slavery effective January 1, 1863.

The Emancipation Proclamation, (or Proclamation 95), was a presidential proclamation and executive order issued by United States President Abraham Lincoln on September 22, 1862, during the Civil War. The Proclamation reads That on the first day of January in the year of our Lord, one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three (1863), all persons held as slaves within any State, or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.

On January 1, 1863, the Proclamation changed the legal status under federal law of more than 3.5 million enslaved African Americans in the Confederate states from enslaved to free. As soon as a slave escaped the control of the Confederate government, either by running away across Union lines or through the advance of federal troops, the person was permanently free. Ultimately, the Union victory brought the proclamation into effect in all of the former Confederacy.

Although Juneteenth represents freedom, it also represents how emancipation was remarkably delayed for people who were enslaved in the deepest reaches of the Confederate South. While the proclamation legally liberated millions of enslaved people in the Confederacy, it exempted those in the Union-loyal border states of Delaware, Maryland, Missouri, and Kentucky. These states held Confederate sympathies and could have seceded – which means to withdraw formally from membership of a federal union, an alliance, or a political or religious organization. Therefore, Lincoln exempted them from the proclamation to prevent this. A year later, in April 1864, the Senate attempted to close this loophole by passing the 13th Amendment, prohibiting slavery and involuntary servitude in all states, Union and Confederate. But the amendment wouldn’t be enacted by ratification until December 1865. In other words, it took two years for the emancipation of enslaved people to materialize legally.

On June 19, 1865, Major General Gordon Granger of the Union army arrived in Galveston and issued General Order No. 3 that secured the Union army’s authority over Texas. The order stated the following: (Although freed they have stipulations place on them.) The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive office 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.

Still, even under Order No. 3, as historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. noted, freedom wasn’t automatic for Texas’s 250,000 enslaved people. “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”.