From an early age, U.S. Cong. Danny K. Davis encountered the same historical forces that Juneteenth invites the nation to remember and confront.
At eight years old, in 1949, Davis began picking and chopping cotton in the sweltering fields of Parkdale, Arkansas, moving in step with his parents and neighbors dragging overstuffed burlap sacks down endless rows managing labor that carried the unmistakable echo of chattel slavery’s brutal legacy.
“My parents were sharecroppers,” Davis said. “I grew up on a farm in rural Arkansas and typically, on June 19, people would only work a half day in the fields and then we’d have a great big wonderful dinner.”
June 19 carried a meaning far deeper than a date on the calendar. It marked the day in 1865 — more than two years after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation — when enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, the Confederacy’s final holdout, finally learned they were free, signaling slavery’s effective end in the United States.
“I knew that June 19 was a special day,” Davis told the Austin Weekly News. “They told us that Juneteenth was really our 4th of July. I mean that’s what my parents and other people where I lived as a child. … and we would actually celebrate.”
Once Davis was old enough to read and go to school, he understood better the meaning of June 19.
“I’m not even sure that all the slaves knew even then,” Davis said. “I suspect there were people even more isolated and there were places where they probably still didn’t know.”
“Once I got to congress (1996) and by the time president (Barack) Obama was elected to the (U.S.) senate, (2004) he and I collaborated on a Juneteenth activity in 2005. One year we had it on the House side and the next year we’d have on the Senate side.”
Davis also spoke of Ms. Opal Lee, the “Grandmother of Juneteenth” whose relentless determination helped turn June 19 into a federally recognized holiday.
At age 12, June 19, 1939, Lee’s family’s home in Fort Worth, TX, was torched by a mob of white rioters, an act of terror that deepened a lifelong commitment to civil rights.
Rev. Ronald Myers, Sr., M.D. also played a major role in helping make June 19 a national holiday.
Credited with spearheading the modern-day Juneteenth movement and founding the original National Juneteenth Observance Foundation, Myers, according to those who worked closely with him, was the primary reason Juneteenth went from commemoration to legislation.
In 1997, the House and Senate passed a joint resolution recognizing Juneteenth historical significance. However, it would take 24 years before becoming a national holiday.
Sadly, Myers died in 2018.
“He lived in Greenville, Miss,” Davis said. “It’s also where he had his practice. He too was an activist and a (jazz) musician and would go around the country putting on events and playing his music (trumpet and piano). He was doing the same thing Ms. Opal Lee was doing.”
Davis added that resolutions were put through and ultimately a bill by U. S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX).
A central figure in the decadeslong effort to make Juneteenth a federal holiday. Jackson Lee’s work began in 2013, when she introduced her first Juneteenth resolution in Congress to recognize the day’s historic significance.
Her introduction of annual resolutions in the House built momentum over time. The effort gained major acceleration in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd and the nationwide protests against racial injustice.
“Sen. John Cornyn being from Texas, introduced (legislation) in the Senate and Sheila introduced it the House and of course I co-sponsored it and gave her the option to lead in the House and we ended up getting it passed,” Davis said.
Now that Juneteenth observations are in full swing, the focus now leans toward reparations, with local groups, groups in Illinois and nationally, meeting and planning and also looking into filing class action lawsuits.
Juneteenth is not only a celebration of freedom but also a reminder of how long exploitation persisted after emancipation and how the consequence of slavery, racism and the ensuing Jim Crow laws, shaped the economic, social, outcomes of Black American families.
“I’ve been supporting reparation as long as I could talk about it,” Davis said. “The first bill I signed on to when I first became a member of congress was HR40, (Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act), that Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) introduced (in 1989) before I got there. We never could get any kind of movement on it even though there was a time that Democrats were in charge or had the majority in the House.”
One thing he said he’s learned is that nobody gives power to someone else.
“It may seem dark and tough but we just have to keep the faith.”
In 1997, President Bill Clinton issued (Presidential Apology and Study Request) a formal apology to survivors of the Tuskegee syphilis study and to African Americans, accompanied by a call for a national study on reparations for slavery and its legacy.
Malcolm Crawford, executive director of the Austin African American Business Networking Association — an organization with a mission to create business growth and advocate for emerging and existing business in the Austin neighborhood and the city of Chicago, spoke with the Austin Weekly News about reparations.
Crawford offered that continual requests for study after study are just stall tactics and that the federal government has no intention of paying reparations to descendants of the formerly enslaved.
“It’s like somebody slapping you and you want them to acknowledge that you’ve been slapped, doesn’t fix anything,” he said. “It’s about what will make you whole because of what they did. It’s not for them to say what they’ll do to make you whole, that’s for us to decide.”
Crawford serves on Mayor Brandon Johnson’s Task Force for Reparations.
Created by Executive Order 2024 and launched on Juneteenth 2024, the task force is charged with guiding the city’s first comprehensive reparations study in what is described as a step toward acknowledging, addressing, and repairing generations of harm endured by Black communities.
“On the mayor’s task force you’re not just drilling down on what happened during slavery but it’s repairing what happened in Chicago,” Crawford said.
For him, the focus is always economics and a plan, said Crawford who was part of Invest Southwest, the Retail Thrive Zones and holds responsibility for Soul City.
“We need access to our own economics,” Crawford added. “We make enough money in our own communities. We need guidelines put in place that only on the South and West Side will those dollars be distributed and they’ll be a criteria for businesses. We, (the people and businesses aligned with AAABNA) own about 50 percent of the businesses along Chicago Avenue.”
Black Americans just need a fair shot, he said, referencing Tulsa, Oklahoma prior to the 1921 massacre when Tulsa’s Greenwood District was a prosperous and vibrant community known as “Black Wall Street,” with thriving businesses, cultural institutions, and a strong sense of community.
“From the 1700’s, the 1800’s and til now, nothing has changed,” Crawford said of systemic racism. “We like to think that people are changing but social media proves that it hasn’t with all the “Karen” situations and Black people getting blown away (shot) or beaten by the police. The two lynchings in the South where a white man got two boys from the airport. This is everyday in America.”