“All Quad Citizens Come Celebrate Freedom,” the posters said, inviting people to a two-day celebration of Juneteenth in Davenport in 1989. The street-fest that year on Saturday, June 17 and the history-themed event on Sunday, June 18 made up the first community celebration in Iowa of Juneteenth to grow into an annual event. Thirty-five years later, Quad Citizens are still celebrating the anniversary of the day marking the abolition of slavery in Texas at the end of the Civil War.
This year’s five-hour celebration, with its theme “Still Breaking Chains,” starts at 11 a.m. on Saturday, June 15 in Davenport’s LeClaire Park, and will feature the usual mix of food and vendors representing Black-owned businesses, along with live entertainment and commemorations of the struggles to realize unfulfilled promises of freedom and equality made at the end of slavery. Rhythm on the River Black Music Heritage Festival will kick off in LeClaire Park shortly after the Juneteenth celebration concludes.
“We want to make it festive, but for me as an educator, the history is the most important part of the day,” Ryan Saddler, CEO of Friends of MLK, told Little Village.
The Davenport-based nonprofit has organized the annual Quad Cities Juneteenth celebration since 2017, when it took over from the original organizers, United Neighbors Inc. Friends of MLK has partnered with Common Chord, TMBC at the Lincoln Center to bring Rhythm on the River to LeClaire Park.
The Juneteenth celebration in 1989 was far from Davenport’s first community celebration of emancipation. On New Year’s Eve in 1865, just six months after the final shots were fired in the Civil War, the city’s Black community threw an “Emancipation Festival.” Annual celebrations of the end of slavery were held regularly in the Quad Cities, typically in January or late summer, for decades afterward. But the 1989 celebration was the one that established Juneteenth as an annual event in the Quad Cities.
“Juneteenth” is a contraction of June 19th, the date in 1865 when U.S. Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger issued General Order No. 3, formally ending slavery in Texas. Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation two and a half years earlier, which declared slavery abolished in any state that was part of the Confederacy, effective Jan. 1, 1863. Although it was a turning point in the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation had little practical effect in Texas, which was far from the battlelines for most of the war.
The final remnants of the Confederate government collapsed in early April 1865, when Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia, but an army in Texas under one of Lee’s subordinates fought on until the beginning of June. Following its surrender, General Granger sailed into Galveston on the Texas Gulf Coast, and then the state’s largest city, to assume command. On the day he arrived — June 19, 1865 — Granger issued General Order No. 3.
“The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free,” the order begins. “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.”
That was not the end of slavery in America. There were people in Delaware and Kentucky, two slave states that never joined the Confederacy, who remained enslaved until the 13th Amendment was ratified on Dec. 6, 1865, abolishing “slavery [and] indentured servitude, except as punishment for crime.” But as historian Annette Gordon-Reed explained in her book On Juneteenth, General Order No. 3 has a special resonance because of its second sentence: “This involves an absolute equality… between former masters and slaves.”
Neither the Emancipation Proclamation nor the 13th Amendment mentions equality.
“Announcing the end of slavery would have been shocking enough,” Gordon-Reed writes. “Stating that the formerly enslaved would now live in Texas on an equal plane of humanity with whites was on a different order of magnitude of shocking.”
Resistance to that idea of equality — unrelenting, often violent, sometimes lethal — was immediate. Black Americans had to fight for almost a century before the idea began to be realized. But celebrating Juneteenth had immediately become a part of Texas culture. Over the years, it grew in popularity, and the celebration expanded beyond the Black community.
In 1980, responding to pressure from Black political leaders in the state and popular demand, Texas made Juneteenth a state holiday. The official recognitions got widespread attention, because there was no national holiday recognizing the achievements of Black Americans at the time. It wouldn’t be until 1983 that Congress sent a bill designating Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday as a national holiday to a reluctant Ronald Reagan to sign into law. (Chuck Grassley, in his first term as a senator, voted against it.)
In the decades after Texas made June 19 a state holiday, a handful of other states officially recognized Juneteenth, either a state holiday — with paid time off and office closures — or a day of observance. Starting in 2000, that pace of recognition picked up, and by the time President Joe Biden signed a bill making June 19 a federal holiday in 2021, every state except North Dakota had officially recognized Juneteenth, thanks to the work of activists.
“This is a day of profound weight and profound power, a day in which we remember the moral stain, the terrible toll that slavery took on the country and continues to take,” Biden said, when he signed the bill making Juneteenth a federal holiday.
That bill was passed against the backdrop of the social justice protests that followed the May 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. The protests led to greater awareness of Juneteenth and its significance around the country, and only 14 hard-right Republicans in the House of Representatives voted against the bill. It passed the Senate unanimously. (Even Grassley, in his seventh term in the Senate, voted for it.)
Iowa was among the first states to officially recognize Juneteenth, albeit as a day of observance rather than a state holiday. In 2002, an effort led by the Iowa Juneteenth Observance, which has organized an annual celebration in Des Moines since 1990, convinced the Iowa Legislature to pass a bill declaring the third Saturday in June to be “Juneteenth National Freedom Day.” When Gov. Tom Vilsack signed into law, Iowa became the seventh state to recognize Juneteenth. It was a moment that showed how progressive and inclusive Iowa can be. It was also a bipartisan moment.
Republicans controlled both chambers of the legislature, and Vilsack is a Democrat. Politics in Iowa were different then. To understand how different, consider some of what the current Republicans in control of the legislature and Gov. Kim Reynolds have done in recent years.
In 2022, during a national panic among conservatives about critical race theory, stoked by dishonest reporting by Fox News and other rightwing outlets, Reynolds and Republican leaders pushed through a bill banning K-12 schools and public colleges and universities from teaching “divisive concepts,” such as the existence of systemic racism. This year, they banned all diversity, equity and inclusion programs at public colleges and universities (except for those created to settle lawsuits over discrimination).
And as part of her reorganization of state government to “streamline” state agencies, concentrating more power in the governor’s office, Reynolds signed a bill in May reducing the size of the Iowa Civil Rights Commission, which exists to enforce the Iowa Civil Rights Act of 1965, and stripping the remaining commissioners of independent authority, making them just “advisors” to the commission director she appoints.
The bill also eliminated the six state commissions focused on the status of minority groups, transferring all their responsibilities to one smaller, more generic human rights commission.
Betty Andrews, president of the Iowa-Nebraska NAACP, called these changes “a dangerous blow to civil rights in Iowa.”
“Juneteenth is a moment of truth, a moment of history, and for us a moment of truth-telling through our history,” Ryan Saddler said. “We just want to bring to light the history of the United States, our struggles as a country, but also our triumphs as a country. We want to celebrate all those who have fought for justice.”
“We continue that journey, which is why we chose ‘Still Breaking Chains’ as the theme this year.”
This article was originally published in Little Village’s June 2024 issue.
