On Saturday, Juneteenth celebrations will take place from 10 a.m. – 4 p.m. at Harry E. Kelley River Park with music, dancing, comedy and family activities.
It’s important in Fort Smith because we’re a community, it’s important in Fort Smith to embrace our history, it’s important in Fort Smith to love ourselves and this is how we do that. We fellowship, we get to know each other, we learn our history, we become proud of our history and then we move forward from our history and this is the starting point,” said Jurena Storm, government affairs liaison to the office of Mayor George McGill.
For nearly two thousand years, Christmas existed as a solemn Catholic Mass to celebrate the birth of the Jewish Messiah. In the Modern Era, with state-sanctioning and commercialization, that holy day has become a celebration of lights on trees with an immortal, Nordic demigod commanding an army of elves, and magically traveling around the world with a squadron of flying reindeer. Alas, the process of bastardization has already begun with Juneteenth.
Juneteenth originated as a celebration of the end of slavery in Texas in June of 1865. President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation only proclaimed the emancipation of slaves in territory under Confederate rule, where he had no jurisdiction. Slavery continued in the United States throughout the war, and for many months afterward, only ending in December of 1865 with the ratification of the 13th Amendment.
Fort Smith sat on the river across from the Cherokee and Choctaw Nations, where the 13th Amendment did not exist, and where slavery continued until the Reconstruction Treaties went into effect in 1866. African-Americans whose families have lived in the River Valley for many generations are largely descended from people who continued in slavery for another year after US General Gordon Granger arrived at Galveston Island on June 19, 1865. If we are talking about people from Fort Smith, or the city of Fort Smith, then Juneteenth certainly is not “our history.”
Not that I do not like to party. In fact, the solution is clearly to have more parties. Keep Juneteenth as Juneteenth, invent a separate Federal holiday marking the ratification of the 13th Amendment in December, and invent a special local holiday to celebrate the final emancipation of African-Americans in the nations which Fort Smith was originally created to oversee. Call it Freedmen Day, or Freedpersons Day if the historically-relevant terminology is now somehow offensive. It could also be called “Jultenth,” because the Choctaw and Chickasaw treaties went into effect on July 10, 1866, or “Augleventh” because the Cherokee and Creek ratified their treaties on August 11, 1866.