Outside the windows of the Gould Library Athenaeum on Feb. 24, there was snow on the ground, but inside, a group of Carleton community members was thinking about summer. Specifically, summer in Galveston, Texas, 161 years ago, when the United States Colored Troops, a Union Army regiment composed primarily of Black soldiers, marched through, proclaiming their freedom and the freedom of all Black Americans.
Steve Williams, President of The National Juneteenth Observance Foundation (NJOF), stood in front of the group in the Athenaeum and began marching himself as he described the revelatory impact these soldiers had on the Black people of Galveston in 1865, who were still enslaved nearly two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation.
“Now, you got to understand, there’s over 9,000 of these Black men in U.S. uniforms, and these people in Galveston have been told, ‘You are nothing. You won’t be nothing. You never will be anything,’” Williams said. “You hear the stories, like from attorney Fay Williams, who got [the story] from her grandfather who was there [in Galveston], he said: ‘We heard soldiers marching, but they had a different groove to their step; It had a different tone. And then we saw there were Black men in uniform, carrying rifles, they had “U.S.” on their buttons, and all they said is, ‘Y’all as free as we are free.’ That’s the symbol that started Juneteenth.”
Williams’ presentation was part of an event titled “Juneteenth: Origins and Misconceptions Discussion.” Juneteenth — a holiday celebrated in the U.S. on June 19 — is described on the National Park Service’s website as “the oldest known U.S. celebration of the abolition of the chattel slave system, and the emancipation of enslaved African Americans in Texas.” Though the day has been celebrated for generations, the holiday was officially made a national holiday in 2017. Williams and the NJOF were instrumental in the movement to federalize the holiday.
Carleton Professor Jorge Banuelos organized the talk partly for his course AFST 113: ‘Introduction to Africana Studies’ as well as for the Africana Studies department’s Black History Month programming. The event was sponsored by the Mary and Fred Easter Endowment for Africana Studies, the Ethical Inquiry at Carleton program, the Office of Intercultural Life, the Africana Studies Department and the History Department.
“I use AFST 113 to expose students to a range of topics and themes within the field of Black Studies (another common name used for Africana Studies),” Banuelos wrote to the Carletonian. “Mr. Williams’ presentation touched on several matters that we have discussed in the course. Those topics include the American abolitionist movement: how we memorialize slavery in our contemporary moment and how non-academics make use of scholarly methods outside the university.”
Over the hour-long event, Williams interwove his experiences of working to get the holiday recognized with a historical lesson on its origins. Citing historical documents and oral histories gathered by the NJOF, Williams argued against many popular beliefs about Juneteenth — particularly the popular narrative that focuses on a man named General Gordon Granger and credits a document called General Order No. 3 for spreading the news of Emancipation. Instead, Williams argued that the true emancipatory force in Galveston was the pride and power displayed by the United States Colored Troops, which showed the Black population of Galveston that freedom was possible.
“How did this narrative of Granger come about? This is a distortion of history,” Williams said. “Sometimes when you see something coming [and] you can’t stop it, you try to distort it … There’s groups and organizations that … are a little bit over 130 years old, [and] their whole purpose was to distort history — to promote the Lost Cause narrative.”
Anton-August “Ashton” Macklin ’27, a student who attended the event, said he appreciated Williams’ “Reframing” of the history as a moment of “active agency.” Macklin celebrated Juneteenth growing up in Texas, but he said that attending the event introduced him to new, interesting perspectives on the holiday.
“We have a narrative of Juneteenth that is much older than the federalization of the holiday — we’ve known about it, celebrated, talked about it for quite a bit. Even so, [the history] wasn’t [explored] to the same extent or depth as the speaker gave it,” Macklin said.
After clarifying the history behind Juneteenth, Williams spoke passionately about the future of the holiday, arguing that Juneteenth should not be thought of as exclusively a celebration for Black Americans.
“Let me explain this to you about Juneteenth: it is an American holiday … Before the 13th Amendment and Juneteenth, it was ‘white male property owners’ and then everybody else. There was no women’s rights, there was no children’s rights, nobody had anything… Everybody was under that yoke until those guys stepped up on Juneteenth. So if you’re into gay rights, women’s rights, civil rights, equal rights, everything else — it all rides on Juneteenth. That’s why we say the 4th of July freed the land, and Juneteenth freed the people — not just the people enslaved but everybody else,” Williams said. “Juneteenth makes the Constitution live up to its creed. It is everybody’s holiday.”
Williams’s focus on inclusion in the celebration of Juneteenth bled into his presentation style. He regularly asked the audience questions and spoke candidly about his personal history.
“This was probably the first guest speaker that I’ve seen at Carleton who was not … a formal academic in the traditional sense,” Macklin said. “It was a good moment of public scholarship that, at least for me, I wasn’t expecting because I had not looked up the speaker prior to going. I was sort of expecting it to be the kind of Carleton-esque ‘here’s a professorial lecture on misconceptions about Juneteenth.’ But it felt very much like an uncle telling stories, and that was enjoyable.”
After the official ending of the event at 6:00 p.m., Williams stayed in the library with a few students to answer and ask questions for another 35 minutes. At this time, students talked to Williams about how their coursework related to current events, and Williams invited students to join upcoming NJOF initiatives.
“I was especially pleased to have rich critical engagement with the presentation from my students,” Banuelos wrote. “We have emphasized the need to be critical in our study of the worldwide African diaspora, and they did an excellent job in bringing their ‘thinking caps’ to the presentations. I hope that this moment galvanizes student interest in the work of Black Studies!”