Jabbering About Juneteenth
News and Reflections Regarding Our New National Holiday
2024 has come by quick. We have now come to the start of the summer holiday season. Happy Juneteenth everyone!
I can only think to begin this tribute to our new holiday by starting with this year in Juneteenth news:
R.I.P. Willie Mays. Many rightfully consider Mr. Mays “baseball’s second-greatest figure, behind Babe Ruth.” He was a true legend on and off the field.
Mays was also the victim of a truly bizarre instance of racial prejudice and discrimination. During his legendary career, he “had trouble purchasing a home in a fashionable San Francisco neighborhood, when neighbors complained that property values would decline if a Black family moved in.” You have that right. Somehow, according to these people, having one of the greatest ballplayers live next door to you would actually lower your property value. Eventually, the whole incident caused the city great embarassment and bad press, and “the owner of the home finally went ahead with the deal.”
Here’s some more baseball-related updates. Earlier in the year, Major League Baseball—for all of the many other mistakes of its recent leadership—made the right call in adding the Negro Leagues stats into its official record books. Among the most important changes, Negro Leagues hitting legend Josh Gibson now passes the Detroit Tigers’ Ty Cobb as the MLB career batting average leader. Willie Mays benefited from the boost as well. His statistical totals from the 1948 Birmingham Black Barons, and from his time at “the venerable Rickwood Field,” have been added to his official major league records.
In sadder news, an Oklahoma Supreme Court decision last Wednesday may represent “the final legal stop” for the last two known centenarian survivors of the horrific Tulsa Race Massacre. For those who do not know, the Tulsa Race Massacre has been widely considered “one of the worst episodes of racial violence in American history.” During that massacre, up to 300 Black Americans in “Black Wall Street” died at the hands of a mob of white men “deputized by the civil officials.” They assaulted the neighborhood from the land and the sky, ultimately decimating it and destroying the neighborhood wealth built up in it. Despite the legal defeat, remember that we can continue Lessie Benningfield Randle (109) and Viola Ford Fletcher’s (110) fight against silence and for justice—whether in Tulsa or in the many other places where racial atrocities occurred.
In happier news, the Honor Flight Network organized the first Juneteenth trip of Black veterans to Washington D.C,. Please check out the USA Today story on the flight. And remember, just like we did then, we are fighting a new Double V campaign, for freedoms abroad and for freedoms at home.
In just plain strange news, we have all heard about Justice Clarence Thomas’s love for secretive trips and luxury travel at the invitation of billionaire political donors like Harlan Crow. However, you probably heard much less about Thomas’s recent suggestion that the Supreme Court “overreached its authority” in Brown v. Board of Education. I repeat, Brown vs. Board of Education. The insanity (and hypocrisy) of Thomas’s “originalist” approach to the Constitution never fails to amaze me. It seems Thomas’s life mission is to make the man he replaced, Justice Thurgood Marshall, roll in his grave.
In some just plain stranger news, a Black VP contender for the Trump ticket, Byron Donalds, has recently sung the praises of the supposed benefits of Jim Crow-style segregation. Ironically, if Jim Crow were in place today, Donalds would not have been allowed to marry his own wife.
But enough with that. Juneteenth is also an opportunity to reflect on heroism and the struggle “to bend the moral arc of the universe” ever closer towards justice. As Shakespeare once said, “Be not afraid of greatness. Some men are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them.”
Personally, I think greatness is a practically equal mix of all three. Greatness, if I may say so, is means, motive, and opportunity. Especially when it comes to those great people that pushed the Civil Rights movement forward. Take the life of local civil rights trailblazers like Ray Rickman. In his one-man play, appropriately entitled “The Civil Rights Kid” (I highly recommend you see the performance for yourself, if possible), he revealed something interesting.
That is, his lifetime work in civil rights all started with 3 odd coincidences. First, his father just so happened to be a chauffeur for Ray White, the then-executive vice president of General Motors. Then, his father died suddenly in 1959, and White gave his mother the Lincoln Ray’s father used for work as a funeral gift. Finally, his mother sold the car and bought a house in a largely white neighborhood (albeit with police protection at move-in, not to mention a Catholic priest who came by every hour to get the white neighbors to behave).
Without that series of coincidences, Ray Rickman would not have been plunged straight into the Detroit push for school desegregation. If he were not in the right place at the right time, he would not have been the chief plaintiff in a court case that involved national organizations like the ACLU, the NAACP, the Urban League, and the Socialist Party.
Those coincidences played out again and again throughout Ray’s life. How did Ray secure a spot in James Meredith’s famous “March Against Fear” in 1966 Mississippi? Well, U.S. Rep. Charles C. Diggs Jr. needed a substitute to take his place in the march. Otherwise, Diggs risked passing up his first chance to visit Egypt. Ray, whom Diggs knew well from his student walkout days, was a perfect fit.
Of course, coincidences do not always work out so well. During that same march, the police arrested Ray for “trespassing” (a huge truck ran the marchers off the road, and onto a man’s farmland). After arresting him, and putting him in a cell, they subjected him to a brutal beating. Why? Possibly because he just so happened to be the smallest kid there.
History always happens with the assistance of some lucky and unlucky accidents. Something as simple as a wrong turn led to the assassination of an archduke and the start of World War I. Accidents can be a chance to achieve greatness, or they can be a chance to oversee great disasters. It all comes down to how people make use of these accidents.
Again, means, motive, and opportunity. We are living in a highly consequential time. The fate of American democracy is in our hands. The future of racial progress in America is in our hands. If we allow the moment to just slip away, our children and grandchildren will be the ones to suffer for it.
Remember that on this Second Independence Day. Greatness has been thrust upon all of us. So, as the old song goes, “let us march on until victory is won.” Take your spot on the shoulders of the civil rights giants.