An impeccably-dressed General Lee presented his sword to a slovenly-uniformed General Grant on April 9th of 1865. The army of Virginia, the great hope of the Confederacy, surrendered. The United States Civil War officially ended on May 13th of the same year.

What could that mean for Black slaves in and around Galveston, Texas?

Their lives of servituded continued. Perhaps whispers had reached them of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. But without the might of Union armies to enforce it, the Presidential order was merely words. Laborers continued picking cotton in the fields. House servants tended to the domestic needs of the plantation owners.

That all ended with the arrival of Union forces on June nineteenth. A year later, the first Junteenth celebration would commemorate the event as the end of Black chattel slavery in the United States.

If only liberation from slavery translated to an equality of citizenship.

But once the last Union troops left the former confederate states, the era of “Jim Crow” began. Statues of Confederate war veterans like Lee became monuments in the public square. “Separate but Equal” would enshrine into law the very unequal treatment of Black people. Only the 1954 “Brown v. Board of Education” decicision, and the Civil Rights activism lead by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and many others would end “Jim Crow.”

If only liberation from segregation translated to a full equality of access and participation in society.

scampering

across the patio

a robin

I’m hosting at dVerse Poets for Haibun Monday, where we write today about Liberation.

The pub is open! Come join us!