Juneteenth, according to a northern Black

An African American woman might be ashamed to admit she had to go research Juneteenth, but I am not and I did.

Juneteenth started as a Texas holiday celebrating African American freedom. Being a Northern African American person, I wouldn’t know much about it, though it’s a federal holiday. I’m not just saying that. Joe Biden made it one. He signed it into law June 17, 2021.

That was 41 years after Texas made it a state holiday.

And Texas made it a state holiday 125 years after the event.

According to the congressional records, on June 19, 1865, in Galveston, Texas, Union Army Major Gen. Gordon Granger informed the people of Texas “that in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.”

The “Executive” was Abraham Lincoln, and he had freed them two-and-one-half years earlier on Jan. 1, 1863.

To my mind, Juneteenth could be called a holiday of tardiness. And might be the origin of “colored people’s time,” also called CPT, which means late. Except white people were the late ones.

Juneteenth.com, says there were Texans who knew before June 19, 1865, that the enslaved were freed. These were people who could read. So, Juneteenth could be said to be a holiday born of illiteracy.

Though I am sure some Black people in Texas knew how to read despite laws that made it illegal for Black people to know how to read or to teach them. Some African Americans always know how to do things white people don’t want them to know how to do.

The 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 2024 National Book Award went to a book in which Black people during slavery times knew how to speak proper English but only spoke it to each other. Whenever the Black people slipped and spoke proper English in front of white people, white people peered at them and asked, “Why you talking like that?”

And apologizing, the Black people spoke the “dems” and “does” to satisfy the white person’s expectations. That’s called code switching. The book reimagines Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” It is titled “James”  by Percival Everett, and it’s hilarious.

I had to research the Juneteenth holiday because that was not information passed down through my family. My maternal family have been Northerners living in Ohio or Michigan for 185 years.  My paternal family came from Georgia to Detroit in 1923. I am from Up North and the East Coast. We planned for the 4th of July.

Juneteenth happened Down South, or as teen rapper Play said in the film “House Party” when he was accounting for his parents’ whereabouts on the night of his shindig: “They Down South, way Down South.”

Information being passed was also what was happening that first Juneteenth. And the info was late.

Reasons vary for that. Juneteenth.com said it was late because the authorities wanted to get in one last good cotton harvest. Two and one-half years to pick cotton?

Slavery was harder than I thought. 

The event happened at Galveston, Texas, a popular spring break location today, a coastal city on the Gulf Coast of Texas, but way back in the day it was an island in the Gulf of Mexico. We think of Texas as a 10-gallon cowboy hat and barbecue state, but it’s a huge state with a southern border of water.

Juneteenth Up North is said to have started with Ralph Abernathy’s 1968 Poor People’s March in Washington, D.C., aka Chocolate City. There, Black people passed the news of this great holiday. Today, Juneteenth is the only internationally celebrated holiday marking African American freedom. 

So, Juneteenth is a southern holiday, a holiday created by tardiness on the part of the white people for whom freeing slaves was not all that important.

Information is everything.  Good accurate information can determine the course of life.

Once the people found out about being free, they celebrated. I imagine some people looked at Granger with the question in their eyes: what does that mean? Free?

It’s an idea that needs action.

Others got the idea right away. Juneteenth.com said some left the plantations right away. No doubt they had talked and planned their escape for a while, generations even. From 1619 to 1865.

Still, others were more practical. They went shopping in their former enslavers’ closets for new clothes, a practice popular among friends today. But they weren’t friends. Lincoln and Granger said the relationship was now employer and employee.

Does being a northern Black woman mean I did not know how to celebrate Juneteenth?

That’s a hard no.

Black people — South, North, East, West — celebrate everything with food, music, looking good and community. Be it Christmas, or Easter, birthdays, funerals, or Juneteenth. Last year, 2024, was my first formal Juneteenth. I dressed in red and white and sang while walking in the Lansing Juneteenth parade with my sorority, Delta Sigma Theta Inc.

Lansing’s 32nd Annual Juneteenth Celebration 2025 starts this Saturday, June 14. To my professorial mind, an appropriate Juneteenth celebration would include an emphasis on literacy. Lansing’s does. The Kick-Off Ceremony & Essay Awards Program at Lansing Community College Building is on Tuesday, June 18.

The big Juneteenth celebration at St. Joseph Park is June 21.  That’s two days after the real Juneteenth. Being tardy is in the right spirit.

(Dedria Humphries Barker is the author of “Mother of Orphans: The True and Curious Story of Irish Alice, A Colored Man’s Widow.”)