Hello and welcome to Episode Thirty Eight of Page Turn: the Largo Public Library Podcast. I'm your host, Hannah!
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The English Language Transcript can be found below
But as always we start with Reader's Advisory!
The Reader's Advisory for Episode Thirty Eight is Light It Up by Nicholas Petrie. If you like Light It Up you should also check out: Nothing Short of Dying by Erik Storey, Deception Cove by Owen Laukkanen, and Fox Hunter by Zoë Sharp.
My personal favorite Goodreads list Light It Up is on is Book Series for Men Who Like Action.
Happy Reading Everyone
Today’s Library Tidbit is on the History of Juneteenth!
For those that don’t know Juneteenth is a portmanteau of June and Nineteenth and is so named because it is a holiday celebrated in June on the Nineteenth.
Juneteenth has gone by a few different names, Freedom Day, Jubilee Day, Liberation Day, and Emancipation Day. It is the celebration of the emancipation of people who had been enslaved in the United States. Specifically it is the celebration of the announcement that slavery had been outlawed in the United States and that all people who had been enslaved were free people made in Texas by the Union Army General Gordon Granger on June 19th, 1865.
Now for those of you who were taught US history in schools you may noticed some weird discrepancies with the dates you were taught. After all the Emancipation Proclamation was made on September 22, 1862, and on January 1, 1863 3.5 million enslaved African Americans were free under the law in the United States of America. But with the American Civil War the land mass that was considered the United States of America was constantly changing. The American Civil War officially ended on May 9, 1865. Who then was still enslaving people in June of that year? Short answer, a lot of states. Medium answer, news took time to travel. More complicated answer? People were still being enslaved in Delaware and Kentucky up until the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment on December 6, 1865, and of course the Thirteenth Amendment still allows for the enslaving of people if they have been imprisoned, which is partially why we have such a bloated prison population.
So once slavery was abolished by the Emancipation Proclamation, President Abraham Lincoln had the Union Army announcing this fact as they advanced during the Civil War. Texas being more remote than other slave states the Union Army didn’t focus on that state for most of the war. This meant that the enforcement of the new law was slow and inconsistent. On June 19, 1865 Union General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston Texas and read out the proclamation at the Union Headquarters at the Osterman Building, as well as a few other locations including the Customs House, the Courthouse, and the now named Reedy Chapel-AME (African Methodist Episcopal) Church.
The proclamation he read was:
The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of 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.
The proclamation starts out fairly strongly. I personally do not enjoy the idea that they expected enslaved populations, who had experience immense abuse and trauma, to stay and work for those that had abused and traumatized them. Especially as it took a series of legal cases in the Texas Supreme Court of formerly enslaved people to have legal status as free people between 1868 and 1874. But, it did,
