Monday, June 19, was the 158th anniversary of Juneteenth, which marks day that enslaved Black people in Confederate states were finally declared free by executive decree. Although the Emancipation Proclamation took effect on Jan. 1, 1863, it couldn’t be implemented in states still under Confederate control. Nationwide, therefore, freedom for enslaved Black citizens began with Juneteenth, almost five months after the Thirteenth Amendment became national policy, when Union troops arrived in Texas to enforce the end of slavery, although of course “freedom” was, and continues to be, a relative term.
I’ve had the good fortune to receive a decent education, but until a couple of years ago, I had never heard of Juneteenth. I suspect I’m not alone. For 115 years, not one state formally recognized Juneteenth. Then in 1980 one state — somewhat surprisingly, Texas — led the way, designating it a holiday. In 2021, President Biden signed a bill declaring Juneteenth a federal holiday. It passed by a vote of 415 to 14, the opposition coming from lawmakers who, underestimating the intellectual capacity of the average American, argued that citizens would get Juneteenth confused with July 4 as they struggled to grasp which Independence Day they were celebrating.
Coincidentally, I just finished reading “Truevine,” which is a nonfiction account of the brothers George and Willie Muse, sons of a sharecropper family near Roanoke, Virginia, who in 1899 were kidnapped into what in essence amounted to slavery. As Black boys born with albinism, the Muse brothers had a unique appearance that made them appealing to a circus promoter, who lured them from their home and exploited them as sideshow performers for decades, profiting from their allure to audiences as “ambassadors from Mars” or “sheep-headed cannibals from Ecuador.” To sever the ties from their past, the boys were told that their mother was dead.
The Muse brothers spent most of their lives working for the circus, essentially enslaved, decades after slavery had ostensibly ended in the United States. Independence came to George and Willie only through the tireless efforts of their mother, who never gave up hope of finding them, and who, when the Greatest Show on Earth visited Roanoke, located her boys — now adults — in the sideshow, and stood her ground in the face of eight police officers and Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey legal team, eventually negotiating a contract for her sons that included a salary and the right to return home in the off-season to visit their family. Although their manager regularly skimmed from their wages, the Muse brothers were able to send money home to their mother, who bought a home and a farm and slowly worked the family out of poverty.
George and Willie both eventually returned to Roanoke in the 1950s to live out their days, cared for by loving relatives as blindness and other conditions related to their albinism made independent life unfeasible. Curiosity about the Muse brothers’ genetic condition was rampant, but relatives fiercely guarded the privacy of these two men who had been gawked at and humiliated for most of their lives. George died first, in 1972, but Willie lived to be 108, dying in 2001 and buried on a blustery spring day, complete with both snow flurries and a rainbow. Finally, both Muse brothers were free.
