Many African Americans think of Juneteenth — which commemorates the public announcement of the end of slavery made by the Union Army on June 19, 1865, in Galveston, Tex. — as a second Independence Day for the United States and the first real Independence Day for them. It has been celebrated by Black communities for generations and increasingly by several states over the past 40 years. In 2021, President Biden made it a federal holiday.
While America’s founding documents declared freedom for all, the country denied it to Black people and maintained their enslavement. A century later, that first “Juneteenth” announcement by Union Army Gen. Gordon Granger declared “an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property” for African Americans. They were finally free — or so they thought.
But the freedom announced that day was fleeting. Within three decades it was gone, replaced by the legal Jim Crow segregation system despite the recent passage of constitutional guarantees ending slavery, defining citizenship and extending suffrage to freedmen (not women) in the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments. This denial of basic rights was undergirded by White racial terror, lynching, humiliation, rape and other human violations against which African Americans had little recourse.
While African Americans across the United States fought the everyday indignities and de facto discrimination they faced outside the South, their efforts were particularly focused on ending the legal segregation and racial terror of Jim Crow. Movements to regain legal rights and break apart Jim Crow segregation in the South have been well documented. Black generosity is not as well documented.
Black individuals and communities propelled and sustained the fight for equality in the South through a range of voluntary philanthropic actions, including charitable giving, volunteerism and building their own institutions, such as schools. In this moment when several constitutional freedoms are under threat, we have much to learn from that first “Juneteenth” generation and their significant efforts to regain what America had taken away from them.
One member of that generation was Madam C.J. Walker (1867-1919), the Black entrepreneur and philanthropist who built a successful beauty products business in Indianapolis in the early 1900s. She gave generously of her time, talent and treasure to fight Jim Crow segregation by supporting Black education, social services, anti-lynching advocacy and Southern voting rights (even though as a woman, she was never entitled to vote in her lifetime).
Like millions of other African Americans, she participated in Black organizations that promoted and practiced generosity to meet community needs and fight for freedom. These organizations included fraternal orders, women’s clubs and churches.
In the late 1800s and into the 20th century, Black fraternal orders proliferated as African Americans founded and joined secret societies, such as the Colored Knights of Pythias, to create safe spaces for themselves, incubate Black businesses and perform charity. In the 1890s, Black women formed the National Association of Colored Women, a federation of clubs that provided social services, education, advocacy and other programs for Black families. Facing threats of racial and sexual violence, Black clubwomen took public stands against injustice.
Denied services by many White nonprofit agencies, hospitals, schools, orphanages and churches, African Americans joined with White allies to create civil rights organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909 and the National Urban League in 1911. But they were also prolific in building their own institutions through advocacy and charitable giving.
This mobilization of Black generosity was so pervasive that activist and scholar W.E.B. Du Bois declared in 1909, “Few races are more instinctively philanthropic than the Negro.”
Most of the Divine Nine Black collegiate sororities and fraternities, such as Alpha Kappa Alpha and Alpha Phi Alpha, were founded in the early 20th century to promote leadership development and community service. They funded college scholarship programs for Black students and regularly donated to organizations such as the NAACP. Later, their membership ranks produced thousands of foot soldiers in the struggle for freedom, including iconic leaders such as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Septima P. Clark.
Black churches conducted a range of “home and foreign missions” work that included building schools domestically and abroad, promoting literacy, caring for the sick and advocating for policy change. The labor and capital for these efforts came directly from their congregations as membership in Black Baptist and Methodist churches, for example, swelled to 6 million people by the 1920s.
Decades later, these churches provided people, food and money for protest marches and civil rights campaigns that spread across the Jim Crow South.
Generations of African Americans after Juneteenth fought for equality they would never see, and their generosity led to the churches, schools, fraternal orders, service clubs and advocacy networks that formed the front lines of the civil rights movement of the 20th century.
For instance, in 1919, Madam C.J. Walker placed the NAACP into her estate plans as a beneficiary of the sale of her 34-room mansion in Irvington, N.Y. She died a few months later, but her legacy lived on. In 1952, Walter White, the national head of the NAACP, told an audience in the Bronx at a graveside memorial service for Walker that: “Mme. Walker’s generosity virtually saved the NAACP in the dark days of the depression.” On the cusp of historic legal victories in the 1950s and 1960s, White implied that the NAACP was in position and ready for that next leg of the freedom struggle because of generosity such as that of Walker.
After the first Juneteenth, the generosity of African Americans built the organizational infrastructure that toppled Jim Crow and achieved social change in the 1950s and 1960s through numerous Civil Rights Acts. But the freedom they yearned for and invested in is now under threat.
Today, fundamental rights once presumed secure are being contested and reversed. State legislatures are making it harder for Americans to vote. Schools are banning curriculums that teach students the history of oppression that gave rise to Juneteenth. The Supreme Court is threatening women’s reproductive health rights, at a time when Black women have the highest maternal mortality rates in the country.
While the moment it commemorates is indeed celebratory, Juneteenth should remind us that freedom ain’t free or promised. And that the generosity and resistance exerted to re-secure lost freedoms must never cease.