The Tellings of June
June is not just any other month. To we Americans, it is a month filled with historical significance. And while it is true that every month has historical significance to us, June stands out in a particular way. It is a month that reveals, time again, truths about our past, our ideals, our struggles, and our present in a way that is hard to replicate in other months.
Three Junes come to mind, each separated by roughly one hundred years.
There is Bunker Hill, the true test of the early revolutionary moment—whether to submit to forces far superior in both number and organization or stand and fight for certain principles that would, in time, give birth to self-rule, liberty, constitutionalism, and justice—to democracy.
The battles of Lexington and Concord had been tests in their own way, to be sure. Yet Bunker Hill was where the lines were drawn with a breadth of finality. The British would not rest until the colonists were brought back into submission to Parliament, and the colonists—like Joseph Warren—resolved to die rather than relinquish what they believed was the birthright of all Englishmen: self-rule.
“Our country is in danger, but not to be despaired of,” Warren told Bostonians. “Our enemies are numerous and powerful; but we have many friends determining to be free, and heaven and earth will aid the resolution.” Warren was candid: ‘‘You will maintain your rights or perish in the glorious struggle.”
After Lexington and Concord, Warren, like Christ on the cross, committed his body and soul into the hands of a higher power, writing, “Our all is at stake. The mistress we court is liberty, and it is better to die than not to obtain her.”
On the fateful day of Saturday, June 17, 1775, Warren was shot in the face and killed instantly as he covered the retreat of his fellow patriots. “He fell,” Samuel Adams lamented days later, “in the glorious struggle for public liberty.”
But as is the case with most things American—and human—that public liberty was imperfect. The Declaration of Independence announced “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” as the natural right of a humankind “created equal,” yet slavery would persist for one hundred years until the cancerous institution was at last eradicated.
More than two years after Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, on Monday, June 19, 1865, Union Major General Gordon Granger arrived on the island of Galveston, Texas. “The people of Texas are informed that all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of rights,” Granger declared.
Those declared freed (on paper, at least) “spent that night singin’ and shoutin’,” one contemporary recalled. “They wasn’t slaves no more.”
Thereafter, Black Americans held emancipation celebrations commemorating Lincoln’s “bolt from the sky,” as Frederick Douglass recalled the document of January 1, 1863; by 1890, “Juneteenth” replaced “Jubilee Day” to describe a day of escape and restoration.
“The old plantation melodies were transformed into a new song,” a Galveston newspaper wrote of celebrations in 1878, “and the sunshine of the dreams that once dwelt in their hearts burst full and fair.”
But like the War of Independence, the high hopes of emancipation and abolition instead brought a devastating dose of imperfection and humility. America—the South especially—was not yet ready to fully extend what Charles Sumner called “the promises of the Declaration” to all people. The once enslaved were free, but that freedom was more purgatory than bliss.
“Liberty has been won,” Sumner declared, eulogizing Lincoln in Boston on June 1, 1865. “The battle for equality is still pending.” He added, with optimism, that “The cause may be delayed, but it cannot be lost; and all who set themselves against it will be overborne, for it is the cause of humanity.”
It would take another one hundred years to see the fruits of the cause of Lincoln and radical reconstruction flourish; the Black-led civil rights movement, ending more or less in 1965, at last succeeded, though not entirely, to enshrine protections into law for what was promised in the first two hundred years of the American experiment.
But even then, the task was incomplete for countless other Americans. Gay people continued to suffer inhumane and un-American discrimination, which was, and still is, a complete rejection of the letter and spirit of America.
It was not until 2003 that a state in the Union (a Union constituted explicitly “to secure the blessings of liberty”) recognized same-sex marriage, and it was not until the historic month of June 2015 that the Supreme Court at last ruled that marriage equality is a protected constitutional right of all Americans in all states.
“Our nation was founded on a bedrock principle that we are all created equal,” President Barack Obama said from the Rose Garden on Friday, June 26, 2015. “The project of each generation is to bridge the meaning of those founding words with the realities of changing times—a never-ending quest to ensure those words ring true for every single American.”
But later that day, Obama gave a different kind of speech—one much less joyous but equally powerful in its theme of lingering ideas.
Nine days earlier, an avowed white supremacist with a fetish for the dying gasps of the Lost Cause of Alexander Stephens’ race-based Confederacy entered a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, shooting and killing nine people, including the state senator and Reverend Clementa Pinckney.
Just hours after his address on the American triumph of marriage equality, Obama flew to Charleston to deliver a eulogy for Pinckney and the rest of the victims. “As a nation, out of this terrible tragedy, God has visited grace upon us, for he has allowed us to see where we’ve been blind,” he said. “He has given us the chance, where we’ve been lost, to find our best selves.
“For too long, we’ve been blind to the way past injustices continue to shape the present,” the president added. “Perhaps we see that now.”
As day became night back in Washington, D.C., the White House shined bright with rainbow colors, a poetic conclusion to a powerful day in our history when, amidst the tragedy of death and the lingering specters of hate, America chose its better self, reaffirmed its first principles, and chose to let liberty and love light the way forward.
Now, as ever, June reminds us of what has been, what is, what perhaps always will be, but, above all, what is possible in this beautifully imperfect land of hope and struggle.