All over the South, freed Black people seized the opportunity of Union General William T. Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15, issued on January 16, 1865, which set up 400,000 acres of liberated land from South Carolina to Northern Florida. Over 40,000 people established self-governing ‘freedom enclaves’ with schools, businesses, civic organizations, and churches. Tragically, however, their dreams dried up like raisins in the sun, after President Abraham Lincoln, was assassinated 14 April 1865.

While Congress was not in session, the newly sworn-in, ‘people as property’ owning President, Andrew Johnson, pursued programs to reconstruct the Confederacy, advance States’ rights, pardon the traitors (provided they took an Oath of allegiance to the Republic), and later enacted an executive order repealing Special Field Order No. 15. His command coalesced sociopaths into a swarm, who like locusts, later disappeared many Black communities of resistance, leaving their descendants to tell the story.

Elsewhere, in this post-emancipation era (1865-1877) a time of terror and uncertainty ‘free-ish’ Black folks were coerced to relinquish property back to the former White landowners and then forced into forms of farm tenancy as day laborers, sharecroppers, or into convict leasing schemes used by local governments and States to exploit a callous clause in the 13th Amendment allowing mass incarceration of persons convicted of crimes. Writer, Douglas A. Blackmon explores this in, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.

This system of oppression kick-started what Syracuse University political science professor, Elizabeth F. Cohen terms dilemmas of citizenship and semi citizenship. In other words, “whose” rights count, and to what extent? Unlike European immigrants who obtain full citizenship, the Reconstruction Amendments (or Second Constitution) awarded Black people, semi-citizenship status with partial bundles of political rights. Laws, legislated and/or those created by court order, for example, affirmative action, voting, or civil rights, make semi-citizens’ status precarious laws may be meagerly enforced or overruled. Pursuits of happiness may be ostracized or criminalized.

Since the 17 June 2021 Presidential Proclamation, many stories of Juneteenth recklessly conflate it as equivalent to the settler colonists’ Declaration of Independence from England, on July 4, 1776. That’s absurd. The tricky truth is, General Granger’s Orders No. 3 and also No.4, and including enforcement efforts of them, exclusively constitute, only those essential elements commemorated by the Juneteenth holiday.

What started on 19 June 1866, as an ambitious affair of what Black Texans called Emancipation Day, where 250,0000 folks gathered, shared meals, debated ideas, and held oratorical contests, along with dancing, singing spirituals, processions, and prayers, gradually gained significance as those freedom communities’ descendants, relocated to various parts of the country. Many held ceremonies in cemeteries to honor their ancestors, especially Civil War Colored Troops. Later, their ancestral tribute evolved into the nation’s Decoration Day, 30 March 1868, (renamed Memorial Day in 1971).