Yesterday US President Joe Biden signed a bill into law that officially recognises Juneteenth (19th June) as a federal holiday.
Known as Juneteenth National Independence Day and historically known as Jubilee Day, Black Independence Day and Emancipation Day, this holiday commemorates the end of slavery in America.
The last remaining slaves on a plantation in Galveston, Texas, were indeed informed on June 19th, 1865, that they were free by the Union army major general Gordon Granger who read out Abraham Lincoln's emancipation proclamation. Though the president had signed the proclamation more than two years earlier, many African Americans were actually still held as slaves in Confederate territory.
"By making Juneteenth a federal holiday, all Americans can feel the power of this day, and learn from our history, and celebrate progress, and grapple with the distance we’ve come but the distance we have to travel," President Biden stated, while Texas Democratic Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, the sponsor of the Juneteenth legislation, stated in an interview with NBC News that the bill passage "indicated that the original sin of this nation was acknowledged and that America can begin to talk about it in a unified manner".
While this is a step forward, it is definitely not enough to eradicate racism and hatred. Juneteenth is now an official American federal holiday, but it should be a moment to stop and think for the rest of the world and for Europe to consider the key role it played in the slavery trade.
In previous posts we looked for example at the connection between slavery, textiles and cotton, considering the documents, items and articles documenting the links for example between Scotland and products supplied by slave societies, from tobacco and sugar to rum, coffee, cotton and indigo.
Checking museum archives and collections, we will easily discover that the prosperity of many Europen cities in the 1800s depended from slaves.
Art can help us looking at history from those times with very different eyes: in Kimathi Donkor's "UK Diaspora" (2007) series the London-based contemporary Black British artist of Ghanaian, Anglo-Jewish and Jamaican family heritage, makes an investigation into transatlantic slavery using portraits.
In these works Donkor reminds us that behind grand works of art and portraits that we often see hanging in our museums there was forced labor and slavery as the white people portrayed as the embodiments of Christian beliefs and civilized culture, were often directly or indirectly involved in these atrocities. Quite often the works of art were commissioned to artists paid with the profits of slave trading so that the white Western art systems of patronage that gave life to European portraiture can in some parts be considered as the result of slavery.
Using symbolisms and allegories, Donkor created therefore a series – "UK Diaspora", acquired by Liverpool's International Slavery Museum for its permanent collection – consisting in multi-faceted and multi-layered portraits that look like assemblages of objects, surrounded not by a beautiful gold frame, but by frames of nails and chains. In these revised portraits Donkor attempts to honour Black lives and make justice to them by inviting viewers to question historical figures such as Queen Elizabeth I, Elizabethan mariner Sir John Hawkins and George Washington.
Often banknotes and coins and dollars in particular are integrated in these works, and Donkor uses them to encourage people to think how this historical figure considered as the embodiment of trust was an active slave holder for 56 years.
Donkor's works also remind us that there may be no more slave ships, but there are new forms of slavery often awaiting migrants fleeing poverty, escaping Africa on wooden boats and rubber dinghies. If we do not address racism, inequality and inhumanity, rather than celebrating the end of slavery and leave it behind in the past, we will take this horrific practice into the future.
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