Juneteenth: Reflection and Redetermination on the Personal and National Levels

June 19th 2021

The oldest nationally-celebrated commemoration of the end of slavery in the United States, Juneteenth is both a day of remembrance and celebration of how far we’ve come – and a day to recognize how far we have yet to go. Across the country, celebrations are held to mark the day that, more than 150 years ago, Black enslaved Americans were freed from the barbaric practice that is slavery. It was June 19, 1865 when troops arrived in Galveston, Texas to announce that the Civil War had ended and Black Americans had been freed.

But that was not the true end of slavery in America. Many of today’s root causes of hunger are fueled by generational poverty and systemic racism that can be traced all the way back to our nation’s founding. Effects of systems and policies implemented in the years following Emancipation remain very present today, including the disproportionate rates of hunger experienced by Black Americans and other communities of color. Data from the US Department of Agriculture shows that Black Americans experience food insecurity at nearly double the rate of White Americans. And the effects don’t stop at hunger and poverty; Black Americans are incarcerated at more than five times the rate of White Americans, experience widespread discrimination in housing and education, and face widely disproportionate health and economic impacts from COVID-19.

Though we have a long road ahead to address these incredible disparities in our communities, we are making small strides to acknowledge our country’s racist roots and address the repercussions. Here in Oregon, we’ve moved to recognize Juneteenth as an official state holiday, and just this week President Biden signed legislation declaring a federal holiday as well.

We recently sat down with Taylor Stewart, founder of the Oregon Remembrance Project, for a chat about Juneteenth and the pursuit of racial justice in Oregon. We discuss how we can use this day as an opportunity to elevate our understanding of and participation in changing the future. Through his words and some additional resources for learning, we invite you to reconsider the altered history we are taught in America and to recognize the immense, profound opportunity that lies ahead to shift the outcome of our shared future.

Oregon Food Bank: Taylor, thank you so much for being here! Can you start us off by telling us a bit about yourself?

Taylor Stewart: I’m appreciative of you having me and being willing to share this story! I just graduated with a Masters of Social Work last week, so I’m excited to go all in on this Oregon Remembrance Project work.

Prior to us talking today, you’d posed the question, “What drives you to do this work?” My answer is my desire to do for others what was done for me.

I wasn’t always this racial justice person. In fact, I was quite the opposite growing up. I grew up in a conservative, White, evangelical environment and I was a product of that environment. I graduated high school as a registered Republican with the dream of becoming a tough-on-crime prosecutor. I started my college education at a conservative Christian school. Halfway through my sophomore year, I transferred to the University of Portland, a more liberal Catholic college. Over the next two and a half years, I underwent a gradual ideological shift, eventually changing my desire from wanting to be a prosecutor to wanting to be a civil rights lawyer.

One day, I noticed a flyer in one of the academic buildings advertising this thing called the “Civil Rights Immersion.” I thought to myself, “Civil rights, that’s something I’m into now.” So I signed up, thinking I was going on a simple sightseeing trip. Instead, that trip would completely alter the trajectory of my life. We went to Alabama, Mississippi and Arkansas. At the time, and still today, I was a big fan of Bryan Stevenson, the Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative. In April of 2018, the Equal Justice Initiative opened up two museums, the first being the Legacy Museum which chronicles the link between slavery and mass incarceration with the belief that slavery didn’t end in 1865 – it just evolved. And the second is the National Memorial for Peace and Justice or the Lynching Memorial.

The Equal Justice Initiative has documented nearly 6,500 lynchings of African Americans between the years of 1865 to 1950. When you enter the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, you’re confronted with these six foot high pillars that have the name of the state and county, and the names of everyone who was lynched there. There are over 800 pillars representing the more than 800 counties where lynchings took place. I had always known about lynching in the abstract but to actually read the names of people who were lynched in this country made this history personal.

I had no idea the magnitude of it all. What got me most was seeing names, and the last name Stewart, knowing that simply time and place separated me from the name on that pillar. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice was a profound encounter with history for me.

I left thinking, “I can’t believe no one ever told me about lynching in America before!” I couldn’t believe that I had gone 22 years in this country knowing nothing about this history, and I couldn’t believe that this is something we weren’t talking about. I left really wanting to be able to share this experience and this history with the others. Luckily, in conjunction with the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, the Equal Justice Initiative had also started the Community Remembrance Project which works in the communities where the lynchings of African Americans took place to find healing and reconciliation through a sober reflection on history. I learned from my trip that there was at least one lynching of an African American in Oregon. His name was Alonzo Tucker, and he was lynched in Coos Bay in 1902.

Initially, when thinking about getting involved in the Community Remembrance Project, I was too nervous. I figured, “Who am I to really think that I could be of any help?” Thankfully, two encounters from the rest of my trip inspired me to change my mind, the first being a quote from John Lewis, longtime civil rights icon and Congressman from Georgia. He asked, “If not us, then who? If not now, then when?” This really inspired me with the fierce urgency of now.

The second thing that helped to change my mind was the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum. Though I was deeply moved by the two Equal Justice Initiative museums, the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum showed me something I hadn’t seen before, and that was the story of the everyday Mississippian who paved the way for justice. It was there that I learned that you don’t have to be an extraordinary person to do extraordinary things.

After those experiences, I had the courage to reach out to the Equal Justice Initiative and I am so proud to be doing this work today. Since then, I’ve learned that we need to ask more impossible questions, like “How do we reconcile lynching?” The search for that answer is transformational. My hope is that in this work, other people can see that they don’t have to underestimate their ability to change the world, because really, it’s ordinary people that do extraordinary things.

OFB: I want to ask a follow up question to a point you made earlier: “Slavery didn’t end in 1865, it just evolved.” Can you elaborate on that?

T: Slavery evolved into lynching and lynching’s most direct legacy comes in the form of the American death penalty. It was at the same time lynchings were going down that the United States execution rate started to go up. Lynching began to taper off during the 1930s, in large part due to the NAACP campaign that decried lynching as America’s national shame. Your everyday Southerner began to see the barbarity of these outdoor events. And so, lynching simply moved indoors where all-White juries and expedited trials would carry out the same verdict as the lynch mob. They would hold 15-minute capital punishment trials and felt they could then say, “Congratulations community! We avoided a lynching!”

The reality was slightly different. Two-thirds of all executions in the United States between 1910 and 1950 were of African Americans. Despite only making up 22% of the Southern population, African Americans accounted for 75% of all of those who were executed in this region. This disproportionality continues to today where African Americans make up 13% of the overall US population, but 41% of those who are on death row. We are so busy asking ourselves the question, “Does this person deserve to die for their crimes?” We haven’t stopped to ask ourselves the question, “Do we deserve to kill?”

We are so busy asking ourselves the question, “Does this person deserve to die for their crimes?” We haven’t stopped to ask ourselves the question, “Do we deserve to kill?”

For context, there is no death penalty in Germany. It would be unconscionable for the country of Germany to systematically execute its citizens, especially if a disproportionate number of those citizens were Jewish. The world would be outraged. We in the United States would be outraged. So where is that same outrage when, given our history, the United States systematically executes its citizens and a disproportionate number of those citizens are African-American? Where is the outrage when, given our history as a state, a disproportionate number of African Americans sit on Oregon’s death row?

I believe that there is no justice unless there’s equal justice. “Equal justice under law” is what it says on the front of the Supreme Court building in D.C., but our system that we depend upon to dispense the most ultimate form of justice is too flawed to produce anything but injustice. I would say it’s broken, but it’s functioning exactly the way it was intended as a replacement for lynching.

In this truth and reconciliation work with the legacy of lynching, we ask, “How do you reconcile lynching?” It starts with remembrance, then it moves to repair. So we’ve started this remembrance of Alonzo Tucker and the legacy of lynching. Now it’s time for us to move forward to address the fundamental question of who our society believes deserves death, because the answer continues to be disproportionately African Americans.

I’m looking forward to moving this effort forward when it comes to ending the death penalty in Oregon because I don’t believe we can truly find reconciliation for lynching until we end the heir to its legacy, so that’s what I’m trying to do.

OFB: How does Juneteenth play into all of this?

T: We remember Juneteenth as this official date when the last enslaved individuals found out that they were free. We recognize the end of enslavement on June 19th, and I’m really pushing for Juneteenth to be this day of reflection. Slavery ended in 1865, but its legacy still lives on. We’re celebrating freedom but I think that we need to celebrate the pursuit of freedom. “Free at last, free at last,” but have we really been free?

I am hopeful that we can turn Juneteenth into this annual day of action where we do recognize the sort of jubilation around the ending of enslavement, but we use this day as sort of a moment of critical reflection on its legacy. We can use this date as a way to deal with some of the ways that that legacy has lived on today.

The first time I was able to partake in a celebration of Juneteenth was actually at a youth correctional facility in Woodburn, Oregon. I volunteered with a group that would go there periodically, and I happened to be visiting on the date of their Juneteenth event. Now, I reflect on the irony of that, of celebrating the end of enslavement while in the midst of all these young African American men who are in captivity, disproportionately placed in this institution. That is an experience I’ve thought more about lately when it comes to Juneteenth because we’re celebrating freedom, but we really need to celebrate the pursuit of freedom. Thinking back, it was weird, celebrating the end of slavery in a correctional facility.

That aside, I think it’s an important day in American history. It’s one of those acts of celebrating wins in battles, even though you haven’t won the war. Malcolm X has a quote that I really like, “If you stick a knife in my back 9 inches and pull it out 6 inches, that’s not progress.” It’s reflective of this moment in American history. We are at a real inflection point in where we could have gone as a society. Blacks had more rights in 1870 than they did in 1950.

We could have, as a society, pivoted more towards a state of equality but instead, following 1865, the United States entered a period of violence unseen in the rest of our history. The counter-revolutionary terror that swept over the former Confederate states had never been seen before. In 1865, we entered into the Reconstruction era, which is an incredibly violent portion of American history. As we reflect on June 19, we can consider where we could have gone as a society had we addressed the great evil of American slavery, the great evil of lynching, the great evil of segregation. It’s not just that we had those things, it’s that we justified them. And we’ve never gotten to the heart of our acceptance of racial differences and our tolerance for what we allowed to happen to people.

There’s a saying that I really like from Kareem Abdul-Jabbar following the murder of George Floyd and the uprising of racial justice protests: “I’m caught in between hope and history.” I believe that we lose hope when we stop believing people can change, so I choose to remain hopeful. And I know that because I myself have changed, I believe that we really can move our society to a different place. We have had so many opportunities to right the wrongs of history and we just haven’t; this is not the nation’s first conversation on racism. But we’re actually recognizing Juneteenth as a holiday in Oregon. More people know about this date. We’re having more conversations on race in America, but America has moved really slowly up the ladder of racial progress. In the meantime, we can celebrate the battles, even though we haven’t won the war.

OFB: And what do you think our future holds?

T: I really think that in order for us to move forward, we have to look back. There’s a lot that we have to do regarding our history. In the wake of Black Lives Matter, we’ve started to have these conversations around needing to expand our collective memory. We need to expand our collective consciousness to hold some of these stories of injustice. I think that we are burdened by our history of injustice, but more importantly, we’re burdened by our history of silence and inaction.

We must take more seriously the idea that we can repair the harms of the past or at least feel compelled by history to make that effort to know what it means to find justice for historical injustice. It starts with unpleasant stories, but that doesn’t mean we can’t rewrite the ending.

To answer your question of what’s coming up next, I’m working to address Grants Pass’s history as a Sundown Town. There was a famous editorial from 1924 called “Let’s Keep Grants Pass a White Man’s Town” where the author very explicitly said, “N****r, we don’t want you here.” Today Grant’s pass is less than 1% African American.

I hope we can rewrite the ending to the story of Sundown Towns where formerly exclusionary communities can become some of the communities most committed to inclusivity because of their history.

I hope in Oregon and in the rest of the United States, we can have more critical reflection on our legacies of injustice and our history, to truly use that history to make changes in our present day and to feel like we can do something. We watch these sorts of documentaries, for example, and you’re left feeling weighed down, unsure how to change anything. There’s a saying from Cory Booker that I really like: “Don’t let your inability to do everything stop you from doing one thing.” So while we can’t change the 250-year legacy of slavery, we can find those one things to do.

I hope that people can take more seriously the call for truth and reconciliation. I really believe that anybody can be a part of this work. The impossible question, “How do you reconcile lynching?” and the search for an answer has changed my life. And I’m hoping to help other people and communities ask their own impossible questions. “What does it mean to reconcile the history of exclusionary laws?” I choose to remain hopeful even though I’m caught between hope and history believing, believing that people and communities can change.”

With heartfelt appreciation and gratitude to Taylor, we hope you’ll join us this Juneteenth – and every day – in rewriting the end to our shared story, starting with the liberation of Black communities.

To further learning and understanding, we recommend referencing these resources: