Do You Know Where You Live?

This month we celebrated Juneteenth in the United States. Juneteenth is a federal holiday celebrated on June 19th each year to commemorate the end of slavery in the United States.

In that day in 1865, more than two years after President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, Union General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, to announce that all enslaved people in Texas were free.

Note: I am intentionally using the word “enslaved” rather than “slave.” Slave is a noun; enslavement is something done to people, not what they are.

To commemorate Juneteenth, I attended an event in Roswell, GA, the city where I live. Roswell was named for Roswell King, a planter who used enslaved labor to support his various business enterprises. He had also been an overseer in coastal Georgia.

While I knew some of the history of my town, I learned many things that surprised me. I recognized how important it is to know where you live, and to understand the complexity of that place’s legacy. And that doesn’t mean ignoring the positive history of your area; that gets plenty of airtime. It means seeing the wholeness of that history.

The Roswell Juneteenth event was held at Smith Plantation, a historic home where the Smith family lived and grew crops using enslaved African Americans. Originally, the land on which Smith Plantation resided was occupied by the Cherokee tribe, but they were removed during the gold rush in Dahlonega, a town in North Georgia about an hour from today’s Roswell.

While a treaty had granted the Cherokee the right to remain on that land, gold and the grab for farmland led to the Cherokee’s tragic removal, often referred to as the Trail of Tears.

I knew about the Cherokee, but while taking a very well-delivered tour of Smith Plantation, the lecturer told me something that shocked me, though it shouldn’t have.

Roswell has three historic homes, each of which was, not surprisingly, a plantation in its past. While many Southern homes and their plantations were together on the same site, one of the Roswell homes, Bulloch Hall, had a plantation separate from the main home. That plantation, along with its many enslaved individuals, was located on the land in which my home sits today.

We also learned about the Smith home itself, the specific skills and talents of some of the enslaved people, the family relationships, and the development of the city of Roswell. It was an excellent lecture.

Some have argued that learning the realities of our racial history here in the United States makes people ashamed of their country. I disagree. There is a difference between shame and responsibility.

Shame continues to cause harm to historically marginalized groups because it keeps us stuck in avoidance.

Responsibility means we can learn, take accountability, and hopefully prevent similar tragedies from happening again.

I invite you to explore the history of your town, the good, bad, and ugly. This act of discovery broadens our awareness not just to the place we live, but to how oppression and resilience operate in the world around us. Lives depend on this awareness and more importantly, on the actions that follow.