What to the New Afrikan is Juneteenth?

Monsour reflects on what the official story of Juneteenth leaves out, re-contextualizing this important date within a New Afrikan national narrative.

i was recently asked about how i view or celebrate Juneteenth. As i thought about this question, i figured it would be good to share my thoughts with more people.

For some time now, maybe a little over a decade, i’ve done a 24-hour fast as a way to contemplate how far We’ve come as New Afrikan / Black people, the struggles and sacrifices that people before me have made; but also, to contemplate those things as inspiration to continue to fight, to understand what We’re fighting for, and what We can never go back to.

So this is not a day for me to eat barbeque, chicken and watermelon, or sweet tea; i fast, reflect, and do extra prayer on top of the daily salaat i usually do. For me, it’s a day of solitude and solemn reflection.

Now politically, in terms of the broader conversation, the question is sometimes asked in regards to Juneteenth - is it a reactionary thing, or a revolutionary or progressive thing? Especially in light of the fact that it is now a federal holiday.

And i would say it’s neither in and of itself. It depends on what We as New Afrikan / Black people do with it in Our narrative. We have to understand that there was, and continues to be, a war for the New Afrikan mind.

We’re talking about a counterinsurgency war, an intellectual and psychological war, that attempts to rob Us of historical memory and subsequently of true self-determination in Our struggle as a people.

We have to begin to analyze Our story for Ourselves. And i think when we do that, and Juneteenth is put in its correct context, then it can begin to have a progressive effect, agitation-wise, on Our people. And i’ll attempt to do that in these brief comments.

So on June 19, 1865, the union army showed up to Galveston Island, Texas, and at the point of arms, announced that African descendants throughout that area were now a free people. This came two years after Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation and three years before the 14th Amendment, which made African people in Amerika citizens.

So for a time there, between 1865 and 1868, We were a free people, no longer enslaved. But We also weren’t citizens. So there’s this gray area. And in actuality, this is the first time that We were politically sovereign as a people.

On that day, a lot of Our ancestors walked off the plantations; some turned back because of the economic situation that they were left in, and remained tied to the plantation; while others sought to establish liberated territories for Us.

As is well known, the united states government, the union government, as well as New Afrikan / Black people Ourselves were fearful of the counter-revolutionary agenda of the confederates. And for good reason. The Freedmen’s Bureau (as it was called by the federal government among others things), had “security guards” — for lack of a better term, armed forces — to protect the interests of free people as well as, at that time, what was supposed to be the union’s interests.

And from the early Reconstruction period up to the end of Reconstruction, at different points in time they disarmed — strategically, I might add —New Afrikan / Black people so that they were not in a position to defend themselves. And in some cases this came after actual warfare.

In the book We Will Shoot Back by Professor Akinyele Omowale Umoja, I believe in the first chapter, he highlights one particular historical incident through the life of a man named Charles Caldwell. So Charles Caldwell was from the enslaved area called Hind’s County, Mississippi, which the New Afrikan Independence Movement refers to as the Kush District.

And sometime after the emancipation, he became a leader among the people, and he joined and aligned himself with the Republican Party — I might add this is Lincoln’s Republican Party, not Trump’s MAGA Republican Party — and in 1868, three years after Juneteenth, he became one of sixteen Black Republican delegates to the Mississippi Constitutional Convention.

At that constitutional convention, this brother, Charles Caldwell, and his peers began to initiate what in socialist and communist parlance we would refer to as a democratic revolution — otherwise known as Reconstruction. And in that constitution, they included public education, the elimination of segregation, public accommodations and institutions, universal suffrage for males (of course, the women’s vote would come later).

And the confederate white population was disenfranchised by the nascent Mississippi constitution, which shows you that they were mindful of who their class enemies were. So that policy handed down by the state of Mississippi resulted in 25 Whites, mostly of the elite planter class, being deprived of their right to vote. Of course, as you can imagine, this was a very big deal. You’re in what was at the time a majority New Afrikan / Black populated state; you have sixteen New Afrikan / Black delegates to this constitutional convention; and they actively eliminate political rights from a select group of white nationalists.

And subsequent to that, Charles Caldwell was targeted and sought out for political assassination, at which point he defended himself with arms, and ended up killing the would-be vigilante. And at his trial, he was actually acquitted for that killing which he had done in self-defense. But after that, the Mississippi constitution passed all these democratic laws, and what ended up occurring is that the confederates and the planter class began to institutionalize white supremacist violence. So white nationalist terror attacks.

And they used the democratic party as their electoral arm, and the original KKK and the White Citizens’ League was utilized as the paramilitary arm.

Eventually, every democratic party formation became an armed club. And they sought out people like Caldwell as well as others for assassination and murder.

Just to give one example, in Lincoln, Mississippi, twelve Black people were killed by white vigilantes who were brought in from Alabama when these terrorists ended up disrupting an election on September 4, 1875. So here we are, ten years after Juneteenth, and you have the white terrorists shooting both Black and white individuals that belonged to the republican party. And from there, they began— or continued, i should say— their racist white terror throughout the state of Mississippi.

Caldwell went to the governor at the time to ask the state to arm Black folks as a militia. After about a month, the governor requested, and the federal government refused, to send federal troops to help them out. But the governor did end up arming seven militias. And five of those militias were all Black men. They had armed confrontations with white nationalists, who were unable to defeat this primarily New Afrikan / Black militia.

These same racists then went to the judicial branch of the government with a lawsuit to sue the state of Mississippi for arming this militia—specifically the Black militias. The judiciary agreed that this was illegal, and they subsequently forced the Mississippi governor to disarm the entire state militia. But of course it was predominantly New Afrikan / Black people who were the primary targets of this injustice.

Around ten weeks later, Mr. Charles Caldwell was assassinated by some of these same white terrorists. And i highlight this because this is just one example that shows the extent to which both government and civil society went to circumvent what we could call, again in our parlance, the democratic revolution.

But i will also say that the democratic revolution, or Reconstruction, was not just defeated— it was flawed from the jump. So while We can salute the gains that was made, and We should salute them, one question that still haunts us today that was not on the agenda at the time was the agrarian or land reform question. And for the South, as a primarily agricultural economy, situated as an internal colonial space for northern finance capital —that agrarian land question is primary.

So as is well known, individuals that were in the Black Belt south directly after the defeat of Reconstruction were basically re-enslaved through the sharecropping and tenant farm systems. And this was able to occur because Wall Street and other conglomerates of finance capital that are concentrated in the north and northeast areas of the united states financed the elite planter class. And through that they were able to establish white supremacist control over the South and the Black Belt.

So with the domination of northern finance capital and the local planter elites, in the course of the Compromise of 1877, you have the victory of the white supremacist counter-revolution.

And that’s important to us now because those questions that were buried by that counter-revolution have never been resolved: namely, the land question. And this land that we’re talking about was put into the hands of the same class of bourgeois finance capitalists, so that the people who called that land home for so many centuries have little to no ownership of this land and zero input into the direction that the economy went.

And i would be remiss if i didn’t talk about the role that the penal institution and the 13th amendment has played in the re-establishment of the white supremacist South. As you know, the 13th amendment has this exception clause that says that those who are convicted of a crime can be enslaved — and they still are considered slaves to this day, in 2026.

Now, i think it’s telling that just six months after Juneteenth— June 19th 1865—the 13th Amendment is enacted on December of that same year.

So the agenda, I believe, is clear: it says, Yeah, you got off the plantation, but you’re not going too far.

And subsequently throughout the south you have the establishment of all of these laws, black codes, convict leasing, that used freed New Afrikan / Black as a captive labor force to re-establish an infrastructure in the South (of course this is a national thing but it’s concentrated primarily in the South) that had been torn down by civil war, by the counter-revolution that took place within the Reconstruction Era, and of course the introduction of capitalism becoming the dominant economy throughout the south as well as the north.

And i think that this context is very important in terms of this conversation about Juneteenth, because what it does is, or what i hope it does, is take it out of this one-day, celebratory, individual thing, and instead fit it back into Our collective national narrative.

So of course Juneteenth was a good thing. I can only imagine what the people that day felt, the celebration and the tears and the joyful spirit that was in the air.

However, it was one day in a long line of our national story as New Afrikan / Black people. So to minimize or erase what happened directly before and after June 19th, 1865 is a total miscarriage of justice.

And beyond that, it can become an active form of counter-insurgency. In this era that we live in currently, where critical race theory and book bans and all these things—in Texas, for example, we have the 1836 Project, right? 1836 is the year of Texas’s independence from Mexico, the counter-revolutionary where Anglo-Saxon racists separated the state of Texas from Mexico.

And during the uprisings of 2020, neo-confederates in the Texas state government instituted a counter-narrative campaign which they called the 1836 Project. And this was to counter the well-acclaimed 1619 Project. And so it’s not a conspiracy to say that we are in an era of intellectual warfare, psychological warfare, which amounts to counterinsurgency. And the most readily available way to counter propaganda is with counter-propaganda.

So as they put their spin on it, as they do addition by subtraction and leave out so much of Our story how Our path continued after 1865, it is our duty to ensure that they are not successful in that -- that we paint the whole, full picture, and that we try to do so in a way that guides us in our contemporary action. And I hope these brief comments can be a small part of doing that.