Juneteenth Commemoration in the Interest of All

By Biko Agozino 

 “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.” W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1935

 .  

 Juneteenth is a commemoration (not a celebration) of the last day that enslaved Africans in Texas were informed by Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger that they had been emancipated following a proclamation issued by President Abraham Lincoln more than two years earlier without being told by their enslavers. The Order promised ‘absolute equality of personal rights between former masters and slaves’ who should now relate to one another as ‘employer and hired labor.’ 

The emancipated men were advised to ‘remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages’. They were prohibited from flocking to military posts in search of protection from racist mobs intent on lynching them and they were told that ‘they will not be supported in idleness’ anywhere. The language of the June 1, 1865 General Orders, Number 3, is racist and paternalistic. It assumed that the enslavers will exclusively be the employers of labor while the enslaved will quietly work for wages in the homes owned by the former enslavers. 

They were expected to remain on the plantations and continue working for those who enslaved them. Any hints of the demand for reparations were dismissed as the expectations of being ‘supported in idleness’ even though working hard was known as working like a Negro. There was no expectation that people of African descent would ever move away from the plantations to seek better opportunities elsewhere (there is still no Freedom of Movement in the US constitution), nor that they could become employers of labor in their own rights, nor run for office as leaders. 

 Not surprisingly, Frederick Douglas and many former enslaved people did not celebrate June 1 because they preferred to commemorate January 1, 1863, when the Lincoln emancipation proclamation came into force. According to Henry Louis Gates Jr., the ‘celebration’ of June 1 came to be preferred by African Americans perhaps because January 1 is too cold a time compared to June 1 but it may not have been the cold weather as such, it could be the contradictory messages in the General Orders, Number 3. 

 The original emancipation proclamation referred narrowly to people who were enslaved in confederate states, leaving hundreds of thousands enslaved in the border states to remain in captivity until the 13th Amendment to the Constitution in 1865 finally stated that "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." In other words, penal slavery or convict labor system remains lawful! . 

In June 2021, the US Senate voted unanimously to recognize Juneteenth as a Federal Holiday but 14 Republican Party members of Congress were the only ones in the House of Representatives to vote against the public holiday. Despite the commemoration of Juneteenth as a public holiday, white supremacy continues to be the order of the day in the criminal justice system, housing, healthcare, voting rights, education, and employment but without a significant effort to offer reparative justice to the descendants of the enslaved. 

 Adiele Afigbo published The Abolition of the Slave Trade in Southeastern Nigeria: 1885-1950 to show that although the British claimed to have abolished slavery in 1834, they had no intention of doing so in Africa where colonialism assumed the role of plantation slavery. It was only after Igbo and Ibibio women rose up to oppose what Walter Rodney termed the ‘double squeeze’ according to which maximum surpluses were extracted from workers and peasants by the colonizers through the fixing of the prices of imported manufactures as well as the prices of exported raw materials and through forced labor that the British started making serious efforts to end what they called ‘domestic slavery’. The women who declared war against colonialism in 1929 were massacred by the British and the Enugu coal miners who demanded a living wage were also massacred in 1949 to show that colonialism was just another name for slavery in Africa.

 The equivalent of Juneteenth in Africa is May 25, also known as Africa Day, the exact date when George Floyd was murdered by police officers to amplify #BlackLivesMatter protests worldwide. Thanks to the awareness raised by the protesters, computer software companies finally began replacing the master/slave codes in their designs with stem/branch alternatives whereas they resisted this change since 2003 when the Los Angeles County contracting office objected to the original language and refused to do business with companies that retained it. The first such master/slave coding was used in South Africa to design a public clock in 1908. 

 About 100 years earlier, Georg Hegel borrowed from the Haitian revolution, the master/slave dialectic to suggest that only masters who fought for freedom deserved equality. He was wrong because a true slave mentality is a revolutionary mentality focused on the plan to escape or to fight and end slavery. Africans should commemorate Emancipation Day too the way African Caribbeans commemorate August 1, Fus Ah August, as Emancipation Day. 

The day should be marked with the reading of relevant history books in schools and in the community and the demand for the ending of modern slavery and for reparative justice to be paid to people of African descent. Instead, many states and the federal government are banning the teaching of African American history, claiming that it is divisive or offensive, as if it is not part of American history. 

 Dr. Agozino is a Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061, 540-2317699, agozino@vt.edu

Doctoral Student Mentorship Testimonial

From an Ivy League Doctoral Student who reached out to me for mentorship after reading my work: Dear Professor Onwubiko Agozino, Good morning. Thanks for your prompt response and feedback. I will download, collect, and incorporate these documents, readings, and classic texts into my lists as much as possible, but the outcome depends on the approval of my comprehensive committee. From the last five years, when I started to apply for my higher education, to the present day, I did not get any emails or any feedback on the weekend from any of my white professors, although sometimes I feel it is an emergency or necessary for my project and scholarship application. I am grateful for your prompt, insightful, and impressive feedback on my comprehensive exam preparation. As an orientalist scholar, I feel deep-rooted emotional feelings and responsibilities for my students and fellows outside of my family, neighbourhood and official responsibilities since joining as a lecturer in my department, and I really got this from you from the depths of your heart and you provide feedback as quickly as possible, as I did not think about. In my culture, there are no fixed days or times for communication with my students and fellows. Student needs are prioritized in our cultural norms. We have deep-rooted and lifelong relationships with our students, not as formal professor-student relationships but as guru-fellows. So, it is interesting to mention here from my perspective that our shared feelings, thoughts, and emotional engagements indicate that we are aligned in our goals. We share an ideological convergence and comradeship aimed at transforming the world through scholarship and activism. Our focus is on decolonizing criminology and criminal justice to create a society free from inequality, exploitation, and discrimination, grounded in egalitarian justice. Best wishes to you and your family on Good Friday and Happy Easter. Thanks in advance. Best regards, My response: Dear Fellow-Guru, Glad that you find my suggestions useful. Indian Standard Time or African Time or Colored People's Time is a real thing. An African American once turned up 30mminutes early for a boat trip in Ghana. However, the boat waited an extra two hours to fill up. Then 30 minutes into then, voyage, it stopped for more passengers to be ferried on board. He lost his temper and complained bitterly about the value of time. They laughed and told him that people are more important than time. Thanks for your wise words. Can I share your testimony anonymously? I got the permission to share. Biko

African Americans and Thanksgiving

By Onwubiko Agozino

"The year that is drawing toward its close has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature that they cannot fail to penetrate and even soften the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever-watchful providence of Almighty God." – Abraham Lincoln, 1863.

Thanksgiving was first proclaimed as a national public holiday by Lincoln in 1863 soon after the emancipation proclamation to end slavery and to mobilize over two hundred thousand African Americans to help defend the Union. Was Lincoln thanking the Africans for helping to save the Union? During the 2024 Thanksgiving Holiday, I asked colleagues if President Abraham Lincoln was paying tribute to the contributions of people of African descent when he proclaimed the first national holiday for Thanksgiving Day in October 1863. 

    One response came from a Political Science Professor who stated: ‘No; I don't think Lincoln used the Thanksgiving proclamation to celebrate Black folks. But it's an interesting thought! ‘. Another from an Emeritus Professor of History said: ‘I think Lincoln was unifying the nation by superseding state Thanksgiving days with a national one. Virginia had a Thanksgiving in 1619, before the Massachusetts one that figures in the US’s historical myth of Thanksgiving. And there were sporadic, impermanent national Thanksgivings in the years between. 

    Many American Indian Natives do not celebrate Thanksgiving Day, they commemorate the Day of Mourning Genocide. Some African Americans and White liberals do not celebrate it either perhaps because of the commercialization of the holiday with Black Friday shopping frenzy. Do African Americans have any reasons to celebrate Thanksgiving Day even while also mourning the millions that were lost? Yes, everyone has something to be thankful for. We are not going back to the evil old days!

     See the transcripts of Lincoln's Thanksgiving Day Proclamation (epigraphed above) archived by the Obama White House. The proclamation came 9 months after the Emancipation Proclamation and after the freed Black men and women  changed the battle of the civil war fought over slavery. 

    The proclamation started by urging Americans to show some gratitude for the sources of the food they took for granted. What were the sources of the food and comforts of Americans? The land of the indigenous American Indians, their food crops and their animals deserve all the gratitude that Americans could express, American Indian Natives have continued to contest the mythology that their ancestors peacefully surrendered their land to the invaders and taught them how to grow food to save them from starving to death and from engaging in cannibalism to survive. The natives did not surrender their land and vanish, they were subjected to genocide by the ungrateful conquistadores. The US has since recognized the rightful owners of the land by reserving land for some of the surviving native tribes and nations while others still fight for recognition. 

    Women deserve thanksgiving too for they also provided, and prepared the bulk of, the food Americans took for granted. One of the early advocates of a national Thanksgiving holiday was the slavery abolitionist feminist writer, Sarah Hale, who allegedly wanted to recognize it as a whites-only holiday, probably to avoid opposition from white-supremacist men and women who wanted freed Africans to 'go back to where they came from'. The emancipated Africans defiantly stated that they and their descendants were here to stay, come what may, no matter what others say. 

     Lincoln made his historic proclamation at a conjuncture in history when the survival of the Union was in doubt due to the pro-slavery rebellion of the confederate states over the so-called ‘state right’ to expand slavery to the whole of the United States to end the dilemma of hunting for run-away enslaved people in the land of the free. Initially, Lincoln refused to allow people of African descent to join the Union army and stated that if he could keep the nation united without emancipating a single person from enslavement, he was prepared to do so. 

    He also proposed to repatriate the emancipated Africans to a colony island near Haiti. Eventually, he was forced by the circumstances of confederate battle victories to issue the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, to weaken the economies of the confederate slave states and he welcomed formerly enslaved Africans to join the union army and help to defeat the confederacy. 

    Nine months later, the bravery of the former enslaved Africans in battle had turned the tide of the Civil War in favor of the Union Army and that was the context of the Thanksgiving Day proclamation. Two years later, in 1865, Lincoln made the Gettysburg Address to honor the troops who were wasted in the battlefield towards the end of the war.

"Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defense have not arrested the plow, the shuttle, or the ship; the ax has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege, and the battlefield, and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom." Lincoln, 1863.

At the time of the proclamation, the labor of the enslaved Africans and the poor working class Whites was the main source of the food and industry that Americans took for granted. Lincoln did not make this explicit in his proclamation, of course not. He was saying Graces and giving thanks to ‘Providence’ the way you do even when you know that it was your papa and mama that produced and reproduced the food, goods, and services for your survival. 

     It might be a coincidence rather than a causation that X came before Y, Emancipation before Thanksgiving Day Proclamations in the same year during the Civil War, but there is absolutely no reason why Americans would not give thanks for the sacrifices that people of African descent made to build the nation in chains and defend it since then. 

     On this 2024 Thanksgiving Day, let all Americans remember the sufferings of people of African descent in the country, say thanks to Providence for providing their livelihood, offer apologies to the descendants of the enslaved for the crimes against humanity that the country visited on them, and offer them a significant package of reparative justice. 

     The Obama White House, by archiving the transcripts of this proclamation by Lincoln, may have been calling for reflections on the centrality of African Americans in Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Day Proclamation of 1863. 

    There is no justification for the consensus that erased the African presence from the Thanksgiving narratives by the media, historians, sociologists, and poets. President Biden should use this opportunity of his last Thanksgiving Day celebration in office to issue the long overdue Reparations Proclamation and apology to people of African descent for the crimes of hundreds of years of enslavement that built the United States and defended the Union against pro-slavery rebellions.

 https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/docs/transcript_for_abraham_lincoln_thanksgiving_proclamation_1863.pdf

Listen to President Joe Biden on 3 December, 2024 at the National Museum of Slavery in Angola as the first US president to visit the country. The US should be encouraged to use their bully pulpit to announce a reparative justice package for people of African descent and invite European states to contribute regarding what Biden called 'the original sin' (it is a crime against humanity and not simply a sin) of the US (and European countries, not the US alone), the enslavement of millions of Africans for hundreds of years:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a891uu1dqZA

Signs of Stressful Times

“If you would like to respond to this notification, please place your response above the dotted line. Hello Homeowners, With it being election time, we understand the want to display political signs. However, according to the HOA documents, signs of any kind are not permitted. Error! Filename not specified. (Article XI section 11.20) We kindly ask that you remove any signs that have been placed. Thank you for your cooperation.” 

     I got this notice from my home owners association regarding my yard signs. Is this legitimate? “I don't know the background or details, but it sounds legitimate. Many HOAs have restrictive covenants--and they apparently are citing a specific one that pertains to yard signs. “People often run into problems with their HOAs. Sometimes it is possible to mount a campaign to get a provision removed or modified, but it takes a lot of time and effort!”

     Is the Home Owners Association Constitution in line with this Virginia Law?:

https://law.lis.virginia.gov/vacode/title15.2/chapter1/section15.2-109/ § 15.2-109. Regulations on political campaign signs. "No locality shall have the authority to prohibit the display of political campaign signs on private property if the signs are in compliance with zoning and right-of-way restrictions applicable to temporary nonpolitical signs, if the signs have been posted with the permission of the owner. The provisions of this section shall supersede the provisions of any local ordinance or regulation in conflict with this section. This section shall have no effect upon the regulations of the Virginia Department of Transportation."

    Still waiting for a response from the Home Owners’ Association. Election stress is real. Be kind to your neighbors, friends and family, no matter which candidate they voted for.

Huge Honor

Dear Dr. Onwubiko (Biko) Agozino,

On behalf of the membership of the American Society of Criminology (ASC) Division on Critical Criminology & Social Justice (DCCSJ), it is my great pleasure to extend our warmest congratulations to you! We are thrilled to inform you that you have been selected as the recipient of the 2024 Division on Critical Criminology & Social Justice Lifetime Achievement Award! This award, our highest honor, is reserved for those who have demonstrated sustained and distinguished scholarship, teaching, and service in the field of Critical Criminology. The selection committee has provided a detailed narrative highlighting your remarkable achievements and contributions to the field, which will be shared in full during the DCCSJ Awards Ceremony. The ceremony will take place at the 2024 Annual Meeting of the American Society of Criminology in San Francisco, CA. We would be honored to have you join us on Thursday, November 14, 2024, at the DCCSJ Social, which will be held at The Woodbury (685 3rd Street) starting at 7:00 pm. Your accomplishments will be formally recognized at this event, and we hope you can attend to celebrate with us. Please let us know if you plan to attend the ceremony and social. We look forward to honoring you in person! We are deeply grateful for your dedication and all the contributions you have made to the field of critical criminology and social justice. The selection committee shared the following comment about your work, and I hope it reflects how significant your contributions are to both our field and the DCCSJ membership. From the selection committee: Dr. Agozino was born in Awgu, Enugu State, Nigeria, where he witnessed the genocide in Biafra (1967-1970), about which he writes in his 2019 book “Humanifesto of the Decolonization of Criminology and Justice.” In 2003, Dr. Agozino produced perhaps his most acclaimed work, “Counter-Colonial Criminology: A Critique of Imperialist Reason,” in which he addressed the Global North’s domination of criminology, leading, in part, to the discipline's theoretical and methodological underdevelopment. As a group of his nominators commented, Dr. Agozino’s “body of work is nothing less than extraordinary with his impact immeasurable. Biko has worked tirelessly to challenge the Global North’s dominance of the discipline, exposing its colonial roots while always confronting structural inequality and oppression.” In recognition of this tireless commitment to the values and principles of our division, which includes his many years of mentorship and pedagogy to scores of students, the panel is honored to select Dr. Agozino with the most prestigious award of our division. Indeed, this award is a testament to your remarkable commitment and the impact of your work in advancing the values we hold at the core of our division. Your scholarship continues to inspire the community, and we are honored to recognize you for your outstanding achievements. Once again, congratulations on this well-deserved honor !

The Afrocentricity of Marx

By Onwubiko Agozino 

I was delighted to receive this attached clip from my daughter telling me about a mention of my work by the 'social media sensation, @theconsciouslee. It is a moving commentary on my paper about how much Karl Marx admitted that African history was at the center of his own intellectual activism. My paper was first published in the Review of African Political Economy in 2014. I was invited by roape.net editors in 2020 to blog a summary and update of the article after several authors cited it as ground-breaking. Monthly Review republished the blog in 2020. A graduate student at Cornell University interviewed me for the Unequal Exchange YouTube Channel about the article and the interview audio was made available on Spotify in 2022. Now, this awesome commentary by NAACP Image Award Winner, George Lee Jr. on TikTok has convincingly called attention to the same article. It is about time that I completed the promised book follow-up.

See also the popular podcast, I Mix What I like, that devoted nearly 90 minutes to a detailed discussion of the article that the host described as ‘work that is new to me’ with expressions of the desire to invite me to the show to answer questions arising. As I stated in the paper, some of such questions would only be fully answered in a book length manuscript.

Salute To Courage

 By Onwubiko Agozino

Today, January 15, I reflect on 'The World House' which MLK repeatedly said that we inherited from our ancestors. We must share with brothers and sisters in the Jim Crow South, in Vietnam, in apartheid South Africa, in Palestine and everywhere else. We must share all in a 'Beloved Community' or fight in 'chaos' and burn it down. Achebe identified the world house as Mbari, an ancient symbolic architecture still observed among the Igbo. It requires communal ritual selections of representatives to go into the forest and commune with the spirits of the ancestors for days. They return to restructure and reconstruct the miniature Mbari world (mud) house every now and then. When the foundations are shaky or the walls crumbled, a new one was collectively created to replace it. The new Mbari is  repopulated as usual with images of people from all over the world, along with ancestral spirit figures, animals and plants under the same roof. This symbolizes how tolerant of differences Africans are and it demonstrates that chaos is not always a bad alternative to order or the beloved community, since they coexist; as Abdul Bangura, Horace Campbell and Ron Eglash remind us with theories of the science, arts, and cultural politics of African Fractals. Desmond Tutu called the sharing spirit, Ubuntu or a bundle of humanity (and of nature too). Happy Martin Luther King Jr Day! Happy Birthday to You, Happy Birthday, Happy Birthday to You. Onwubiko Agozino