Juneteenth: Realizing our Ideals

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." In 1776 Thomas Jefferson penned these words, presaged by the writings of John Locke and the Virginia Declaration of Rights, establishing a set of ideals for a new country: The United States of America.

From the beginning, this new country failed to fully live up to those ideals. In order to ensure our country would not be stillborn, the Founders compromised. They set the stage to ban the importation of slaves, and established the 3/5’s rule to hobble the political power of slaveholding states, but ultimately they allowed the institution of slavery to continue, sewing the seeds of the Civil War and centuries of racial turmoil.

Leading up to and during the Civil War, political minds penned some of the most eloquent defenses of the two-tiered Federal system, though fatally flawed by their motivation to preserve the morally reprehensible institution of slavery. In the years that followed, 600,000 men would die that generations would live free.

There have been several milestones on our journey to realizing the ideals laid out at our founding in 1776: The Bill of Rights in 1791, the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862, Women’s Suffrage in 1920, the Civil Rights Act of 1964. As the final elimination of slavery in the United States, June 19, 1865 is deserving of remembrance as one of those milestones.

As any Christian knows, “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” We are human. We strive for ideals, and we fail. But these failures are not an indictment of our ideals, nor do they invalidate efforts taken to live up to them. In our long human history, there have been many imperfect but important milestones (Hammurabi’s Code, the Justinian Code, the Magna Carta). We should celebrate their contributions and learn from their shortcomings. In that same spirit, I celebrate Juneteenth as a mighty milestone as we continue to strive towards an ever more perfect realization of the ideals of our freedom document; the Declaration of Independence.