Juneteenth Proves Black Folks Never Been Free in America For Real

Thank you Mandy Bynum, PJ Schuster, Nick G, A Dude On The Couch, Kerry Shaw, KarenC-Book Collector📚⚖️🗽🗳️🧿♒️, and many others for tuning into my live video with Feel Good Action! Join me for my next live video in the app.On June 19, 1865, General Gordon Granger rode into Galveston, Texas and read what we now call General Order No. 3. Two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation, the enslaved people of Texas were told they were free. That is the part the country likes to keep. Here is the part it tends to drop: the same order instructed the newly freed to remain where they were and negotiate wages with the very men who had held them. Freedom, in the same breath, was routed straight back onto the plantation — into sharecropping, into the Black Codes, into Jim Crow.I grew up in Bryan, Texas, about two hours up the road from where this began. When you read the local archive, you can watch enslavers in those counties work to hide the news — hide the war, hide the Proclamation — because an informed free person is a person who can leave. So when I celebrate Juneteenth, I celebrate it the way my people celebrated it: as jubilee. But I refuse to celebrate it as a fairy tale. The honest word for what happened that day is free-ish.“Granger told the freedpeople to go back to the plantation and negotiate some wages. That is the day we celebrate. So I celebrate it as jubilee — and I refuse to celebrate it as a fairy tale.”Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.The Emancipation Proclamation Was Foundational. It Was Also Nearly Toothless.In K–12 we are handed a clean story: Lincoln signs a paper, slavery ends, the good guys win. The Emancipation Proclamation deserves its place in history, but the mechanics matter. It applied only to states in open rebellion — places taking no orders from Washington. The loyal slaveholding border states (Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri) were untouched; people there remained enslaved. Liberation did not arrive as a switch flipped in 1863. It arrived unevenly, locally, and late — and in Texas, it arrived in 1865 wrapped in an order to get back to work.This is why the structural detail is not pedantry. If you teach Juneteenth honestly, you have to teach that the document everyone celebrates left whole categories of people in bondage, and that the “end” of slavery was a negotiation, a compromise, and a delay. That is the difference between history and mythology.Preserve the Statues, Erase the Slavery: The Conservative ContradictionThere is a contradiction sitting in plain sight. The same political project that, a few years ago, fought to keep Confederate monuments standing — you cannot change history, they said, you cannot erase the past — is now, under this administration, ordering references to slavery scrubbed from historical markers, national parks, and museums. The slogan was never really about history. It was about which history.I taught ninth- and tenth-grade English in Oklahoma when the state moved to criminalize “critical race theory” — a graduate-level legal framework that was not being taught in K–12 anywhere in this country. But once you build policy around a boogeyman, the policy does the work the boogeyman cannot. Teaching the plain timeline of the Emancipation Proclamation and Juneteenth became suspect, because an honest timeline raises an honest question: how is it that the same law used to free us is the same law that was used to re-enslave and to kill us?Hold that question against Reconstruction. We are taught that treason is the highest crime against the country. Yet Confederate soldiers and generals — men who took up arms against the United States — were welcomed back, their leaders never made to answer for it. The same governments that extended that mercy to traitors wrote laws to criminalize Black people for not having a job, not having a pass, not having a place to be — the vagrancy statutes that fed the convict-leasing machine. Amnesty for the people who tried to break the country; criminalization for the people the country had just freed.History Does Not Move in a Straight LineAmericans are trained to imagine progress as one long upward arc: slavery, then the Civil War, then a little rough patch, then Dr. King, then voting rights, then everything is fine. It has never moved like that. It moves in ebbs and flows, advance and backlash, and the backlash is not an accident — it is the response progress provokes.Reconstruction sent Black men to Congress; Mississippi sent the nation its first Black U.S. senator, Hiram Rhodes Revels, in 1870. A generation later, a Black person in Mississippi could be lynched for going near a ballot box. One hundred years after those Union troops reached Galveston, the country passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And in April 2026, in Louisiana v. Callais, the Supreme Court took an axe to Section 2 of that Act — the dissent warned it leaves the provision all but dead — clearing the way for state after state across the South to redraw maps that erase majority-Black and majority-minority districts. The Callais standard even tells courts to give less weight to historical discrimination and demand proof of present-day intent. They are legislating the very forgetting we are here to refuse.“Everything Black people have gained, we gained in spite of democracy, not because of it. Every right that is supposed to be God-given, we had to spill blood for.”“All Fascism Matters”: On Selective OutrageI want to be careful and precise here, because I am talking about policy, not personalities. The tools this administration is using — banning books, criminalizing ideologies, attaching penalties to words like equity, diversity, inclusion, and woke — are democratic tools, mastered and turned against the vulnerable. Calling them undemocratic is comforting and incomplete. They are operating the machine exactly as it was built to be operated.Which is why I cannot let my white liberal and leftist friends off the hook. Fascism cannot only matter to you when the administration changes hands. There were people exercising their First Amendment rights — students getting their heads beaten in, protesters criminalized for how they assembled — under the previous administration too, and a lot of folks stayed quiet because the man in the White House had the right letter next to his name. You do not get to pick and choose when fascism counts, any more than you get to pick and choose when Black lives matter. Pastor Niemöller already wrote the ending to that story: first they came, and there was no one left.Look at this week. Federal prosecutors in Minnesota charged fifteen people with conspiracy to impede federal officers — community members who acted as legal observers, documenting ICE during last winter’s Operation Metro Surge. City council members called it political repression. Meanwhile, the federal agents who shot and killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti during that same operation have not been charged for those killings. Observing is now a felony. Killing remains a matter under review. That is the priority structure, stated plainly.The Insatiable Appetite for Black Death Is BipartisanIf you want literacy in how Black people are positioned in this country, you need a structural analysis — otherwise you will keep reading every killing as an isolated tragedy instead of a pattern. So let me lay it down. Police violence is not a partisan brand. George Floyd was killed in a blue city in a blue state. Ahmaud Arbery was hunted down in a red city in a red state. There has always been a bipartisan solidarity around Black suffering, going back to the Compromise of 1877, when ending Reconstruction — pulling the federal troops out of the South — was the deal both sides could live with. The currency of that compromise was Black death.Huey P. Newton defined power as the ability to define a phenomenon and make it act in a desired manner. The phenomenon here is Black life — defined, again and again, as expendable, and made to behave accordingly. Democrats do not own the fight against it. Republicans do not own the production of it. It runs underneath the partisanship.Black Children Are Never Allowed to Be ChildrenAdultification is the engine I keep coming back to, because the numbers are obscene: the overwhelming majority of children charged as adults in this country are Black children and children of color. We are denied childhood and held to adult standards before we can read. Watch how it operates across three cases unfolding right now.In Senatobia, Mississippi, this past Sunday, police responding to an alleged shoplifting call fired into a car in a Walmart parking lot and killed Kohen Wiley, one year old, critically wounding a family friend. His mother has not been charged with any crime; her attorney says she was trying to tell officers her baby was in the car. Family members say they were buying diapers. Authorities say the vehicle drove toward an officer. Whatever the investigation concludes, hold this fixed: even if every accusation against the adults were true, shoplifting is not a capital offense, and a one-year-old cannot commit a crime.Now set two other cases side by side. In Texas, Karmelo Anthony, seventeen at the time, was tried as an adult, convicted of murder, and sentenced to thirty-five years in the death of Austin Metcalf at a Frisco track meet. In South Carolina, a store owner, Rick Chow, chased fourteen-year-old Cyrus Carmack-Belton more than 130 yards and shot him in the back over a suspicion about four bottles of water — and a jury found him not guilty, accepting that he feared for his life. The same public sentiment that wants a Black teenager held to the absolute ceiling of the law extends a Black child’s killer the absolute floor. “Fear for my life” acquits the man with the gun; it never seems to cover the child running away from one.And notice the cover story for so much of this machinery: protecting children. Anti-LGBTQ and anti-trans bills, drag bans, book bans, the criminalization of Black culture — all of it marched out in the name of protecting children. Page through Project 2025 and count how many times that phrase appears. Then ask how a politics so obsessed with protecting children rationalizes the killing of a one-year-old. That is what I mean by conservative contradictions.The Second Amendment Was Never Written for UsHere is the ugliest part of the gun conversation, and it is not only conservatives who are caught in it. “Shoot first, ask questions later” is normalized in this country — but not for everybody. When some people heard that a teenager in South Carolina may have had a firearm, that was enough to justify shooting him in the back as he fled. Plenty of self-described left-leaning folks said the same thing: well, he allegedly had a gun. If that is your reflex, you are part of the problem too.In open-carry states — South Carolina, Texas, Georgia, Louisiana — carrying a firearm is legal. “Come and take it.” But the mere presence, even the rumor, of a gun in a Black person’s hand has always functioned as a license to kill, while the same hardware in other hands is celebrated as liberty. That is why the press has to keep saying unarmed, unarmed, unarmed — as if being legally armed should have been a death sentence. The Second Amendment, like the rest of the founding documents, was written with a very specific set of people in mind, and we were the exception, not the beneficiaries.From Plantation to Prison: Sugar Land and the Long ChainTrace the chain forward from Juneteenth and you arrive at the prison. In Sugar Land, Texas — now marketed as a comfortable suburb — a plantation became a prison, and a few years ago construction crews unearthed a mass grave of African American remains, the people we now call the Sugar Land 95. They were victims of the convict-leasing system: the machine that re-criminalized the same Black people who had just celebrated freedom, then worked them in the cane and the marshes until disease or exhaustion killed them, at which point the state simply criminalized a new Black body to replace them. The dead ranged from children to old men.That is not ancient history with no address. It has a corporate name on it, named founders, and a named graveyard — which is exactly why “that was too long ago” does not hold. And it did not end as a relic: my home state of Texas leads the nation in incarceration. The plantation, the sharecrop, the lease, the cell — it is one continuous economy, and Juneteenth sits at the seam between its chapters.“If you think what we’re living through is unprecedented, dig deeper into the archive. It is monumental. It is not new.”Free in Spite of DemocracySo when people tell me to protect democracy, to defend democracy, I ask them not to do the same thing this administration does to history — sand off the edges and call it a love story. Everything Black people have endured, we endured under democracy. The right to drink from the same fountain, to use the same bathroom, to read the same book, to receive the same diploma — supposedly God-given rights — we had to spill blood for every one of them, inside this democratic framework, not outside it. We are free in spite of democracy, not because of it.I will end on the hardest metaphor I know, and I offer it as a content warning before I say it. Think about how we talk about the domestic-violence survivor who keeps believing the abuser will change — after years and years of documented harm. I am not going to pretend that dynamic is not gendered; it is. I would argue that is the relationship many people in the democratic West have with democracy itself: a cognitive dissonance, a placebo, a faith that the thing that keeps hurting you will, this time, become the thing it promised to be. I am not asking you to abandon the fight. I am asking you to stop romanticizing the abuser. Sit with the real, ugly, transparent history — and then decide what you are actually willing to give up to change it.What gives me hope is people coming into consciousness — no pun intended. Native Americans did not secure the vote until the 1920s; rights in this country have always been late, partial, and contested. If you believe this moment is monumental, you are right. If you believe it is new, you have more reading to do. The archive is right there. Education is elevation — and that is not a motto, it is the assignment.Five Key FactsThe takeaways to carry out of this conversation.* Juneteenth marks a delayed, conditional freedom. Gordon Granger’s General Order No. 3 (Galveston, June 19, 1865) freed Texas’s enslaved people two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation — and instructed them to remain and work for wages, channeling emancipation into sharecropping and the Black Codes.* The Emancipation Proclamation left people enslaved. It applied only to states in rebellion. The loyal border states — Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri — kept slavery legal, making the document foundational but, on its own, nearly toothless.* Voting rights are backsliding in real time. In Louisiana v. Callais (April 29, 2026), the Supreme Court gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, prompting Southern states to redraw maps that eliminate majority-Black and majority-minority districts — a Reconstruction-to-Jim-Crow pattern repeating.* Black children are adultified by the justice system. The vast majority of children charged as adults are Black children and children of color. The contrast is stark: one-year-old Kohen Wiley killed by police in Senatobia, MS; 17-year-old Karmelo Anthony tried as an adult and given 35 years in Texas; while the man who shot 14-year-old Cyrus Carmack-Belton in the back in South Carolina was acquitted.* The repression is bipartisan and built on democratic tools. George Floyd (blue state) and Ahmaud Arbery (red state); 15 Minneapolis legal observers federally charged while the agents who killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti were not. Black gains came in spite of democracy, not because of it — and the convict-leasing chain (the Sugar Land 95) runs straight into Texas leading the nation in incarceration today.BECOME A PAID SUBSCRIBERI'm fighting to fill a critical void left by the retreat of public education media. I document and teach the histories, legal frameworks, and cultural knowledge that are being systematically erased or distorted. With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you. As a Black educator and researcher my work depends entirely on a community of readers, not corporate sponsors. If everyone reading this became a paid subscriber, we could build a full-time digital sanctuary: a new, independent source of PBS-depth reporting and curriculum, centered on Black expertise. But right now, less than 1% of my followers are paid subscribers.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.WORKS CITED AND RELATED READINGSVoting Rights / Louisiana v. Callais* Supreme Court opinion, Louisiana v. Callais, 608 U.S. ___ (decided Apr. 29, 2026). https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-109_21o3.pdf* Congressional Research Service, “High Court Narrows Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais.” https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/LSB11431* Brennan Center for Justice, case analysis of Louisiana v. Callais (6–3, Alito). https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/louisiana-v-callais* NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Louisiana v. Callais case page. https://www.naacpldf.org/case-issue/louisiana-v-callais/Kohen Wiley (Senatobia, MS)* Mississippi Free Press, officer shooting of 1-year-old Kohen Wiley, June 14, 2026. https://www.mississippifreepress.org/mississippi-police-officer-shoots-and-kills-1-year-old-child-in-response-to-senatobia-shoplifting-call/* NBC News, Mississippi 1-year-old killed during Walmart shoplifting response. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/mississippi-1-year-old-dies-walmart-shoplifting-police-incident-rcna350260* ABC News, officer placed on administrative leave in Kohen Wiley shooting. https://abcnews.com/US/officer-involved-shooting-walmart-killed-1-year-boy/story?id=133965022* Mississippi Today, tear gas used on protesters after toddler’s death. https://mississippitoday.org/2026/06/16/1-year-old-killed-law-enforcement/Karmelo Anthony / Austin Metcalf (Frisco, TX)* CBS News Texas, Karmelo Anthony found guilty of murder (June 9, 2026). https://www.cbsnews.com/texas/news/karmelo-anthony-trial-verdict-austin-metcalf-frisco-track-meet-stabbing/* NBC News, Karmelo Anthony sentenced to 35 years; charged as adult at 17. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/karmelo-anthony-found-guilty-murder-texas-high-school-stabbing-rcna349132Cyrus Carmack-Belton / Rick Chow (Columbia, SC)* Associated Press via ABC7, store owner found not guilty in killing of Black teen. https://abc7chicago.com/post/south-carolina-jury-finds-store-owner-not-guilty-murder-killing-black-teen/19218916/* Prism / Times Free Press, acquittal of Chikei Rick Chow; chase of 130+ yards over water bottles. https://www.timesfreepress.com/news/2026/jun/03/south-carolina-jury-finds-store-owner-not-guilty-of-murder-in-killing-of-black-teen/Minneapolis Legal Observers / Operation Metro Surge* Sahan Journal, 15 ICE observers face federal charges (June 16, 2026). https://sahanjournal.com/public-safety/minnesota-ice-observers-face-federal-charges/* Newsweek, DOJ charges and the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. https://www.newsweek.com/dhs-antifa-cells-minnesota-ice-doj-charges-minneapolis-12079686* NBC News, DOJ charges 15 over Operation Metro Surge. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/doj-charges-15-minneapolis-protesters-metro-surge-immigration-rcna350335 This is a public episode. 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