Juneteenth
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
The last time any government in the United States adopted a policy to separate young children from their parents was when we sold nigger kids as slaves. We called them niggers to distinguish them from human beings.
President Trump does the same thing to protect us from the “animals” streaming across our southern border to “infest” the United States with babies he sees as future MS-13 who will grow up, rape and kill real people, and vote for Democrats.
On the nineteenth of June, 1865, thirty-seven days after the Civil War ended, Gordon Granger, a general of the Union Army with more hair on his chin than his head, rode into Galveston, Texas, to let the niggers know the government would no longer allow their children to be sold as slaves. One woman jumped on a barrel, shouted for joy, jumped off and shouted again, and jumped on and off shouting again and again.
That day is celebrated now in forty-five of our states. Only New Hampshire, Montana, Hawaii, and the twin Dakotas celebrate something else today.
Until today, I had never heard of it, and only by freak coincidence noticed that the next episode I was going to watch of Donald Glover’s FX show “Atlanta” was titled, “Juneteenth.”
Juneteenth represents justice delayed for black people in America. Justice delayed because blacks remained slaves in Texas despite the fact that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation came on New Year’s Day 1863. Justice delayed because blacks remained slaves in Texas despite the fact that Robert Lee surrendered the South more than two months before that massively bearded Union general rode into town.
Justice delayed because freedom won black people in America one hundred fifty years of lynchings, mass incarceration, and Jim Crow culture. For many white people in America, the Civil War never ended, the slaves never really set free. And for the first time, those people feel they have a President who truly represents them.
And for the first time, they’re probably right.
So it’s fitting that on Juneteenth 2018, refugee mothers of color are being separated from their children by order of the President of the United States.
They too now have a day to celebrate.