^{by Tom Head, About.com Guide to Civil Liberties}

Juneteenth celebration (Richmond, California). Photo: David Paul Morris / Getty Images.

TheRoot.com's John McWhorter, a linguist at the University of California at Berkeley, asks: Why celebrate Juneteeth? Excerpt:

Slaves, upon release, generally led lives of miserable sharecropping and other menial labor, and their descendants, as often as not, migrated north to end up penned into segregated slums ...

To me, the real day of celebration—one that I always think about as it passes—is not June 19 but July 2. That was the day the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed. The Civil Rights Act had as profound an impact on the fate of blacks in the United States as Emancipation. Say what you want about how far we have to go, but the official dismantling of Jim Crow was a watershed event in the history of human affairs.

In the years leading up to the American Civil War, Northern abolitionists disagreed about what the best approach to ending slavery would be. Most favored instant Emancipation, in which all slaves would be granted citizenship simultaneously. But some favored gradual Emancipation--a policy that would set a date in advance for the emancipation of all slaves, and give slaveowners time to adjust financially to the new reality. The war rendered the question moot, and instant Emancipation won out. In theory.

But the reality of the situation is that, as McWhorter points out, free Southern blacks for the most part weren't discernibly better off than Southern slaves. Jim Crow laws, such as the Mississippi Black Codes, made sure that Southern blacks of the era stayed poor and lacked political influence. After pretending to protect Southern blacks for less than a decade, the federal government left Southern blacks to the Dixiecrat wolves in 1877 and failed to do its job for another 87 years. To this day, racial profiling, employment discrimination, housing discrimination, hate crimes, cyclical poverty, and other vestiges of the old racial caste system remain.

Sure, some blacks benefitted from instant Emancipation. But some blacks were free prior to Emancipation, too, and that didn't eliminate the reality of slavery. If we separate ourselves from the labels we use to describe policies and look at the realities of human experience, there isn't much difference between a slave and an indentured sharecropper. And if we separate ourselves from the labels we use to describe policies and look at the realities of human experience, there is an undeniable family resemblance difference between someone being born to a life in a slave's chains and someone being inculturated into a life in the chains of prison and poverty. We may have a black president next January, but it is a safe bet that this will not change the hard realities of life--that black Americans are three times as likely as whites to live in poverty, that black Americans are far more likely to go to prison or become victims of crime, that we still live in a culture that has judged the next generation of black Americans guilty before they have even been born.

Opportunities have increased over the past 143 years, and Emancipation and the Civil Rights Act certainly represent milestones in that process, but the Emancipation the abolitionists had in mind--a true and universal Emancipation, an Emancipation that, in the words of William Lloyd Garrison, "includes all the people, with all their rights in their hands, and with an equal power to maintain their rights"--still hasn't happened for many black Americans living today.

So while I wouldn't go as far as to dismiss Juneteenth, I always have to resist the urge to put an asterisk on the word "Emancipation." There is a ghost of Juneteenth past, a ghost of Juneteenth present, and a ghost of Juneteenth future. There is a greater Emancipation, a universal Emancipation, that awaits us still.

See also:

• The Conscience of the King
• Black Civil Rights in America: An Illustrated History