Facts Matter Chris Gavaler
Editor’s note: With the recent passing of longtime columnist Glenn Rose, The News-Gazette has asked Chris Gavaler to fill in Glenn’s column space for the next several months. Chris, who has lived in Lexington since 2001, is a professor of English at W&L.
This Friday, June 19, is Juneteenth National Independence Day, America’s federal holiday commemorating the end of slavery. Though the Emancipation Proclamation declared that end on the first day of 1863, and Civil War combat halted with Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865, the practice of slavery continued in the furthest corners of the former Confederacy until the Union arrived in Galveston, Texas on June 19, 1865.
Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger, with the assistance of 2,000 soldiers, delivered the belated news: “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor.”
With the South’s remaining 250,000 enslaved people now actually free, June nineteenth – truncated “Juneteenth”— celebrates our country’s second Independence Day. Rockbridge will again join the national event with the sixth annual Lex Rock BV Juneteenth Celebration in Richardson Park from 6 to 9 Friday evening. Live music, food vendors, car shows, and kids activities are reason enough to attend, but this year there’s an even greater reason.
Ending slavery did not end racism, and freedom did not bring equality. After passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and ratification of the 14th Amendment in 1868 and the 15th in 1870, our nation’s moral arc toward justice halted for nearly a century. The American apartheid of Jim Crow segregation and white supremacist vigilantism did not weaken until the Civil Rights Movement. When the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the fifth of seven civil rights acts passed that decade, was signed into law during the summer of Juneteenth’s 100th anniversary, America had a powerful reason to celebrate.
Now on the 161st anniversary, America has reason to stand up and renew its fight.
The Supreme Court’s conservative majority reversed the Voting Rights Act with their April decision allowing former Confederate states to redraw maps designed to weaken the representation of minority voters. That decision was possible only because two of Donald Trump’s three appointed justices were improperly taken from presidents Obama and Biden, creating a Court out-of-sync with our inherently moderate nation.
Trump also reversed the Civil Rights Act of 1957, which protected the voting rights of Black Americans by creating the Civil Rights Division to prosecute voter discrimination. Six decades later, Trump removed a dozen of the division’s senior attorneys, including those managing offices investigating police abuse, halting all current probes. He also removed managers of the voting rights section and dismissed all active cases. According to its government website, Trump’s Civil Rights Division is focused on anti-abortion centers, military personnel, and people “sterilized by transgender hormone/therapy” – none of which are civil rights categories.
The Trump administration is systematically dismantling the Civil Rights Movement. Beginning the winter of his second term: The IRS eliminated its civil rights office.
The Social Security department eliminated its Office of Civil Rights and Equal Opportunity and laid off all of its Civil Rights employees.
The Department of Education eliminated nearly half of its civil rights offices.
Homeland Security conducted wide-scale layoffs at its Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.
The Department of Labor eliminated its Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs.
The Department of Justice halted all new civil rights investigations and froze all agreements with local governments addressing biased police policies.
Instead of honoring Civil Rights leader Jesse Jackson, the White House ordered flags to half-staff for Charlie Kirk, a commentator who said that Martin Luther King Jr. was “awful” and “not a good person” and that “we made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s.”
Kirk articulated the Trump administration’s anti-Black prejudice. Addressing a list of prominent Black women, including Supreme Court Justice Jackson, he said, “You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.” Speaking generally of Black people, Kirk said, “If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, boy, I hope he’s qualified.” He extended his racist assumptions even to low-paying jobs: “If I’m dealing with somebody in customer service who’s a moronic Black woman, I wonder is she there because of her excellence, or is she there because of affirmative action?”
Trump’s Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who never earned a rank above major in the U.S. Army, recently overruled a board of Navy admirals and blocked two Black men and three white women from becoming one-star admirals. In March, Hegseth overruled the Army Secretary and blocked the promotion of two Black men and two white women to one-star generals. He told the Pentagon it had become “less capable” because it had “promoted too many for the wrong reasons” and he would now promote “the right people.”
Trump’s unsupported claim that policies that support diversity, inclusion, and equity (DEI) do not also support merit is racist, misogynistic, and deeply ironic given the number of underqualified white men in his administration. It’s also un-American. Our parents and grandparents never imagined that the hardwon battles of the Civil Rights Movement would need to be fought a second time.
But that is the state of our nation on this 161st anniversary of Juneteenth.
