A Question of Freedom on Emancipation’s Holiday

I was asked to make a speech for a Juneteenth celebration we were to have at the shelter I work at. On this day of freedoms jubilee, I wanted to examine in this speech the idea of “freedom”. Here it is.

We are gathered here to celebrate today, our emancipation from the retched bonds of chattel slavery. A dark history that is intertwined with the building of this great nation on the backs of enslaved Africans. We are told to rejoice in the glory of freedoms final ring, a sound that must’ve had a glorious reverberation of joy to all in it’s path in Galveston, TX on that June 19th in 1865. We headed down freedoms path with the promise of economic equality in the form of 40 acres and mules to farm our own land. We would now be the controllers of our own fate, prosperity was on the immediate horizon for a people that had spent the entirety of their time in this country, not as naturalized citizens, but merely as capital. As captives in a system that normalized brutality. That rewarded vicious inhumanity with generational riches. But shackled no more, we were to be truly free.

That reality was short lived as the lie of financial, and in turn legal recompense, became a sort of hellish déjà vu. There was no land to till, there were no mules, only the promise of a bondage renamed called convict leasing. The name changed, but another brutal system…