Juneteenth - Second Independence Day

Juneteenth—America’s Second Independence Day

On June 19, 1865, Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was enforced in Texas—the last Confederate state in which slaves were freed following the end of the Civil War. Slaves in the Union states were not freed until the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified on December 6, 1865.

Juneteenth is called America’s second Independence Day because the Revolutionary War to Independence from Great Britain did not bring independence for the African slaves in America. June 19 was not made a federal holiday until President Biden signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act into law in 2021—the first new federal holiday since Martin Luther King Jr. Day was adopted in 1983.

Women weren’t granted the right to vote in the U.S. until the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified in 1920, Native Americans were denied rights of citizenship until 1924, and voter suppression targeting minorities was commonplace until Congress passed the Voting Rights Act in 1965. The basic democratic principle of the equal rights of all to participate in the process of self-governance has been very slowly and grudgingly accepted throughout the history of the United States of America.

Today, the gains in equality for all Americans of the last 100 years are again in peril, for women, African Americans, Native Americans, LGBTQ, and other cultural and ethnic minorities. The U.S. Supreme Court has nullified the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and reversed the constitutional right of women to make their own reproductive decisions. Court-approved gerrymandering of congressional districts to deny representation to minorities and other voter suppression tactics are spreading across the nation like wildfire.

Opinion polls consistently show that most Americans oppose these actions and support the democratic principle of equal rights and inherent worth. However, a systematic social and political movement has worked for at least the past 50 years to deny equal rights of citizenship to independent women and the growing members of racial minorities destined soon to be the majority of Americans.

The federal courts have been packed with judges who are “Strict Constructionists.” Strict Constructionism is the judicial philosophy that interprets the Constitution literally. These judges decide cases according to their interpretation of the intent of the Founding Fathers who wrote the Constitution, at the time it was written. Since the Constitution did not prohibit slavery and restricted the right to vote to white, male, landowners, they believe any changes in these or other original conditions must be spelled out clearly and concisely in constitutional amendments.

Since voter suppression and gerrymandering are not specifically addressed in the Constitution or its Amendments, the current Supreme Court does not consider such acts to be unconstitutional, even when they deny equal representation of minorities in governance. The Constitution does not specifically grant women the right to make their own reproductive or gender healthcare choices, so the Supreme Court has ruled that such rights are among those the U.S. Constitution reserves for the states.

The Second Amendment reads: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Strict Constructionists refuse to acknowledge the obvious link between the necessity of state Militias in the late 1700s and the constitutional right to bear arms today.

The opposite of Strict Constructionism is Judicial Activism. Judicial activists believe the Constitution should be interpreted as a set of guiding principles that must be interpreted in ways that reflect the evolution of human values and current values and social conditions. For guidance, they look to the U.S. Constitution as a whole and other founding documents, such as the American Declaration of Independence.

Rather than interpret “the right to bear arms shall not be infringed” literally, judicial activists ask under what conditions would Americans support the right to bear arms, and what kinds of arms, if their representatives were voting to ratify the Second Amendment today.

The Strict Constructionists’ literal interpretation of the U.S. Constitution will ultimately erase the progress made in realizing the Founders’ vision of a “democratic” republic of the United States of America. They formed the nation as a republic with a strictly limited federal government that accepted slavery and limited voting rights to white, male, landowners because it would have been impossible for the Founders to have reached a consensus to form the new nation otherwise.

But the Founders' vision for the evolution to a “democratic” republic is clear in the Declaration of Independence which states that all people are endowed with God-given equal and unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and that the fundamental purpose of government is to secure these rights.

The Ninth Amendment clearly states that the rights to be secured by the government are not limited to those specifically protected from denial by the government in the Bill of Rights. It states: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” The equal and inalienable rights of all, regardless of whether mentioned in the Constitution, shall not be denied, but instead protected, by the federal, state, and local governments.

Abraham Lincoln understood this when he spoke at Gettysburg of a “new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” and he pledged that those who have sacrificed to make this proposition a reality shall not have died in vain, “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

We are not engaged in a great civil war, at least not yet. But the God-given, equal rights of all will be on the ballot in the general elections in November 2024. Donald Trump is supported politically by Republicans who detest him personally and pray that he won’t do most of the things he says he will do. I believe most of his supporters see him as their best hope for retaining their privileges as white, male, wealth-holders, or as economic dependents of white, male, wealth-holders.

However, Donald Trump has shown, over and over, that he will try to do what he says he will do and this time there will be no Congress or Supreme Court willing to stop him.  If he is elected, the U.S. will not only no longer be a democratic republic, it will no longer even be a republic. We will have returned to our pre-revolutionary war status of being ruled by an egotistical, oppressive monarch with ambitions of global domination.  The “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” will have perished from the earth.

John Ikerd