The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age
    jollyroger's picture

    Lifting the stain from my soul...

    By jollyroger on Fri, 06/19/2020 - 6:18am |

    Juneteenth...

     

    Not just an African-American holiday of deliverance.

     

    Anyone who has celebrated a Passover knows the enduring power that attaches to the commemoration  of liberation for an oppressed people.

     

    Consider, for a moment, the liberation that also is felt by the oppressor's heirs.

     

    If you will spend merely a minute contemplating the hellish dreams that must of necessity torment the sleep of a person who has collaborated in the kidnaping and subsequent bondage unto the tenth generation of fellow humans, it will (or should) be evident that  the day on which that odious system released its final victims is a holiday for the slaver as much as the enslaved .

     

    We cannot but experience joy at this national cleansing, even as we embrace the continuing need for repentance and reparation.

     

    Happy Juneteenth, America.

     

    What took you so fucking long?

    Comments

    Happy Juneteenth, jolly.

    Having a Zoom celebration with relatives from across the country.


    by rmrd0000 on Fri, 06/19/2020 - 8:13am

    It is a happy day!  Thanks, and Happy Juneteenth to you. (Now, someone please tell my spellcheck bot that "Juneteenth" is not a typo...)


    by jollyroger on Fri, 06/19/2020 - 9:53am

    The Fourth of July is BBQ day for us, no real meaning. Somewhat akin to Frederick Douglass' take on it.


    by rmrd0000 on Fri, 06/19/2020 - 10:40am

    Nothing has meaning. It's all a grab bag of shit. Just remember that. Life sucks. And then some.

    Forever in Dixie

    The Civil War of 1861 to 1865 freed African Americans from their Southern masters, but didn't liberate them from the cotton fields. Fearing the Northern states would be flooded with refugee slaves, a policy of containment was instituted by Union Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas. He arranged for freed slaves to remain in the South and work the fields of abandoned Southern plantations controlled by white Northern owners. Once assigned to a plantation, the former slaves were not permitted to leave without a pass. They worked 10-hour days and were paid $10 a month. When this contract labor arrangement concluded at the war's end, it was estimated that at least two-thirds of these former slaves were defrauded of their wages.

    With friends like those...


    by PeraclesPlease on Fri, 06/19/2020 - 11:42am

    As if on cue

    For people who want so badly for black people to just forget about slavery, conservative white people sure seem bound and determined to hold on to the very monuments that immediately remind black folk of what our ancestors endured. Many of us were beside ourselves with joy after we learned that the 130-year-old statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee would be removed from Richmond’s Monument Avenue, but it appears we started celebrating too early, because on Thursday, Richmond Circuit Judge Bradley B. Cavedo indefinitely extended an injunction preventing Gov. Ralph Northam from proceeding with plans to remove the statue.

    On June 4, Northam announced that monuments commemorating Lee and four other Confederate leaders will be removed and placed into storage. On June 8, Cavedo granted a temporary injunction barring the state of Virginia from removing the Lee statue after “a descendant of the couple who signed the deed giving land for the monument to the state” filed a lawsuit, the Washington Post reports. Ten days later, the descendant failed to prove his case, but Cavedo extended the injunction anyway.

    https://www.theroot.com/richmond-judge-won-t-let-virginia-be-great-extends-inj-1844085118


    by rmrd0000 on Fri, 06/19/2020 - 8:22am

    And of course, Trump takes credit.

    https://www.theroot.com/christopher-trumplumbus-i-discovered-juneteenth-1844081448


    by rmrd0000 on Fri, 06/19/2020 - 8:39am

    The mind boggles, the senses reel...


    by jollyroger on Fri, 06/19/2020 - 2:03pm