Thousands of people in the United States celebrated today Juneteenth with marches, rallies and parties. This day commemorates the abolition of slavery. On June 19th, 1865, the last remaining slaves on a plantation in Galveston, Texas, were informed they were free by the Union army major general Gordon Granger who read out Abraham Lincoln's emancipation proclamation. Though the president signed the proclamation more than two years earlier, many African Americans were actually still held as slaves in Confederate territory.
Though this is not a federal holiday, this is a key celebration for the black community, also known as freedom, black independence and emancipation day. This year the celebrations were also a way to remember all those unarmed people, both men and women, victims of unjustified murders, among them (just to mention a few) Ahmaud Arbery, 25, shot dead in Brunswick by two white men, a father and son, while out for a run; Breonna Taylor, 26, shot dead in March by police who entered her home in Louisville, Kentucky, without warning and George Floyd, 46, killed by a police office in Minneapolis in May. Activist and scholar Angela Davis also appeared at a Juneteenth march at the Port of Oakland, California.
In Europe Juneteenth is not celebrated, but we may have to start reconsidering this as many European cities actually built their wealth on human trafficking and slavery.
In a previous post for example we looked at the connection between slavery, textiles and cotton moving from the documents and items preserved at Glasgow Museums that also launched a dedicated site with articles about Scotland and slavery. Slave societies supplied indeed Scotland with tobacco, sugar, rum, coffee, cotton and indigo. The plantations also fed the factories of the early Industrial Revolution with raw cotton and made the fortune of many, such as the Coats family, which contributed to the prosperity of Paisley.
Studying textiles can lead us to make some discoveries for what regards slavery: for example the fact that profits from plantations in the West Indies where there were enslaved men, women and children were not invested to develop local Caribbean communities, but by merchants and traders in their own countries.
The dye industry in Glasgow was among the ones that prospered with the profits of slavery: in Scotland purple dyes were made with lichen dyes such as orchil, cheaper than the famous murex purple extracted from molluscs. Towards the end of the 1750s, George Gordon and his nephew, Cuthbert, patented cudbear, a purple dye made with orchil using ammonia that could dye silk or wool without the use of a mordant to fix the colour. But the company went banrupt and production halted. In 1777 George Macintosh was backed by John Glassford, a wealthy Glasgow-based Virginia merchant, along with George Bogle, James Gordon and John Robertson, and founded a cudbear dye works at Dunchattan, Dennistoun, Glasgow. Production continued after the death of the founder in 1807, and the George Macintosh & Co. dyers received financial investment from Glasgow West India merchants.
So will we consider a celebration of Juneteenth in Europe as well? Maybe we should take the issue to the European Parliament and raise more awareness about it. In the meantime, we should also start pondering more - even via textiles and dyes - about the wealth generated by slave societies in European cities and think more about how we are making the same mistakes nowadays with companies (including fashion brands) operating their own factories in other countries (such as Africa) and reinvesting their profits in the countries where their headquarters are based, rather than developing better operations and infrastructures where their workforce is manufacturing their products.
Comments