Opinion: Juneteenth, Black history and the miseducation of America | Christa Caceres

This Sunday, two of our nation’s oldest and largest Black national organizations will commemorate our newest Federal holiday in the beautiful Pocono Mountains.

The Greater Pocono Section of the National Council of Negro Women and the Monroe County NAACP Chapter #2275 will host their inaugural “Juneteenth Festival celebrating Freedom, Fathers and Family” at the Mountain Center in Tobyhanna from 12 to 5 p.m. It is indeed a day for joy, reverence, remembrance and cultural pride for the approximately 20,000 Black residents who call Monroe County home.

Why should we celebrate? Despite every obstacle placed before us then and now, we not only laid the foundation for America’s success, we as a people are the epitome of American excellence and our contributions are woven into our nation’s collective DNA.

Beauty, irony, sadness and hope all rest in the story of our freedom, and it is only when we take a full look at the history of Black people in this country and accept full accountability for the shame that surrounds the story will America truly be the “home of the free”.

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Despite President Abraham Lincoln freeing Black people from slavery in 1863 via the Emancipation Proclamation, many whites refused to accept or respect the law. It took two long additional years for some Black people in the South to learn of their delayed freedom.

For many individuals and states, their continued wealth and prosperity were more important than the precious lives and liberties of God’s children.

Many of His darker hues children escaped death during captivity only to lose their lives wearing blue Union uniforms during the Civil War.

An inconvenient truth-both then and now— is as much as we hear calls for “law and order” and full complicity in the face of law enforcement through adherence to rules and norms, many opposed to an accurate teaching of America’s true history are conditioned through willful miseducation to believe they can simply opt in and out of legal compliance at will.

Georgia, Virginia, Alabama and Missouri led the pack of states with statutes outlawing the literacy of Black people with punishments including jail, fines, whipping and flogging. Certain Northern states barred Black children from attending public school and creation of private schools in the North to educate them were met with violent mobs. Since it was illegal for Black people to learn to read or write, those who wanted to retain power and authority over the bodies of our ancestors did so effectively until June 19, 1865.

Lulus blog writes, “Major General Gordon Granger led Union troops into Galveston, Texas to announce that the Civil War was over and deliver the now-famous order Number 3, letting the last of the enslaved people know they were free.

Order No. 3 declared, “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.”

Today, a big push by well-financed groups fronted by innocuous looking “motherly” types belie their mission: a complete erasure and rewrite of American History at the expense of people of color and our LGBTQ+ brothers and sisters.

Education is critical to all kinds of freedoms: be they financial, emotional or physical, and every American has been held captive to the absolute fanatical and easily disproven myth of racial supremacy-something accurate education in our schools would ultimately expose and defeat. These divisive groups look to recruit men and women of all races who need to belong to something or someone.

Because of their miseducation, they’re easily convinced to hate and work to erase and sanitize the history of America to maintain the myth of superiority.

In doing so, they would also remove our amazing story and record of achievements that ultimately made the American flag revered and honored worldwide. That’s an impossibility and an exercise in futility.

Those who try to do so are bound by another inconvenient truth: you cannot erase us. We ARE America. We are great Patriots. Our blood, sweat and tears are engraved upon every star and stripe of the American flag, and our influence is inescapable.

Everywhere you look, we have created or inspired greatness in our nation. Slaves painstakingly built the Capitol that was unlawfully breached in January 6, 2021 by those who feel our laws do not apply to them. Our nation’s capital is Washington DC, which was designed in large part by mathematician and engineer, Benjamin Banneker— a Black man. Mr. Banneker also produced some of America’s earliest almanacs that guide our nation’s farmers in producing crops to feed and nourish our bodies.

Various genres of American music have Black fingerprints on them. Country music’s banjos were derived from African gourds. Rock and Roll, the Blues and many forms of American popular music have roots in African customs and traditions. Our brothers and sisters celebrating Pride this month should know the first drag queen was William Dorsey Swann, who was born into slavery.

Barbecue and Southern/Soul food we enjoy all year long was perfected by black Americans beginning in the 1700s.

There is very little we use or rely upon in America that black people have not created or enhanced. Proper education would make that plain to see. Our lasting influence as a proud and creative people in this great country is permanent.

Attempts have been made to throughout American history until this day to minimize, alter or outright remove the contributions and true story of our people— but they can’t deny greatness. We are proud of the land we enriched and developed, and our legacy is steadfast.

Our deep patriotism is evidenced by our adherence to the belief in the promise of our nation. In the eloquent and prophetic words of Nikole Hannah-Jones: …Black Americans, as much as those men cast in alabaster in the nation’s capital, are this nation’s true ‘founding fathers’. And that no people has a greater claim to (the American) flag than us.” Let freedom ring!

Christa Caceres is the president of the Monroe County chapter of the NAACP.

This article originally appeared on Pocono Record: Opinion: In the Poconos, Juneteenth represents a spirit of hope