'ALL SLAVES ARE FREE' - It's Juneteenth, and a White Nationalist Is President
Marking the holiday and wrestling with our troubled past is the way to find the path to a more equitable future.
Barrett Holmes Pitner
Published 06.19.19 5:17AM ET
With the South rising again on the watch of President Donald Trump, who plans to turn the Fourth of July this year from a celebration of America to a celebration of himself, it’s time for Americans who champion equality to begin celebrating Juneteenth.
June 19, 1865 — “Juneteenth” being a combination of June and nineteenth — should remind all Americans of the long and complex fight required to end slavery here.
On April 16, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Compensated Emancipation Act ending slavery in the District of Columbia by paying slave owners up to $300 for each slave they set free. The federal government allocated $1 million (the equivalent of $30 million today) to compensate D.C.’s slave-owners. The Act also paid the newly freed $100 if they chose to leave America and colonize Haiti, Liberia, or elsewhere. Roughly 3,000 slaves in D.C. became free, but to America’s chagrin most of them stayed in the country. In 2005, Emancipation Day became an official holiday in D.C.
Eight months after the Compensated Emancipation Act, on January 1, 1863, President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation granting freedom to all enslaved people residing in territory controlled by the Union. For obvious reasons, this excluded most of the more than 4 million enslaved people in the Confederate states.
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