A Little Juneteenth History

History is not in vogue these days because the left wants a population that doesn’t know the truth and will easily swallow their lies. So, I’m going to put my former Under Secretary of Education hat on and remind you of a little history.

Juneteenth is a holiday that commemorates the freeing of black slaves in Texas two years after Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Also known as Emancipation Day or Freedom Day, the first Juneteenth celebration was held in 1872 in Emancipation Park in Houston, Texas. It has also been described as “Black America’s July 4th.” 

Of course, I understand the emotions of celebrating the end of the sinful institution of slavery. But there would have been no liberation of the slaves without July 4, 1776. 

The left wants us to believe that slavery was somehow unique to America and central to its founding. That’s what the fake 1619 Project is all about. Sadly, slavery was the norm throughout all of human history. What truly makes America unique is that it was founded on the idea of liberty and we fought a civil war to end slavery.

When the Founding Fathers wrote the words of the second paragraph in the Declaration of Independence -- “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. . .” -- they struck a blow against slavery.  

Now let’s go through some of the history that the left doesn’t want you to know about.

When it came to the issue of slavery, the Democrat Party was the “pro-choice party.” The Democrat Party’s position was that each state should be allowed to decide for itself whether it wanted the choice of owning slaves. Of course, the slaves had no choice.

After the Civil War in which at least 650,000 Americans died (we are the only nation to fight a civil war to end the institution of slavery), the Democrat Party didn’t give up in treating black Americans as second-class citizens. It doubled down. 

It was the Democrat Party that passed Jim Crow laws throughout the South that enforced segregation. It passed a web of laws that were designed to prevent freed slaves from voting.

In the 1960s, Republicans in Congress led the effort to pass civil rights legislation to ensure black Americans were covered under the law by the equal protection guarantees of the Constitution. 

Opposition was primarily led by approximately 20 Democrat senators who did everything they could to prevent those laws from passing. Ultimately, they failed. But many remained in the Senate for years. 

Joe Biden, who has been around Washington forever, has frequently bragged about his friendships with these Southern Democrats. To this day, the Russell Senate Office Building remains named after Georgia’s Richard Russell, an avowed segregationist.

The left has turned our Founding Fathers into monsters by holding them to today’s modern standards. But in their day, they were expanding the promise of America and human freedom. That’s something we should celebrate every day!