“Now, Henceforward, and Forever Free”
nclrights.orgJuneteenth commemorates the anniversary of Union General Gordon Granger’s belated announcement of freedom from slavery in Texas on June 19th, 1865, delivered over two years after Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.
In directing Confederate states to “recognize and maintain the freedom” of formerly enslaved Black Americans, and to refrain from repressing “any efforts they may make for their actual freedom,” President Lincoln understood that he could not impart actual freedom by the stroke of a pen.
As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King wrote a century later from a Birmingham jail cell, “Freedom is never given voluntarily by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.” Black Americans have given their sweat, tears, and too much blood to force freedom forward.
Just as the murder of a Black child, Emmett Till, sparked the Civil Rights movement, the senseless killing of Trayvon Martin galvanized a new generation to demand their freedom.
