Juneteenth: A Question of Delayed Recognition

So I agreed to write an article for AgeWise and found myself incapable, not because I have been busy trying to balance my own endeavors, although I could use that as a reason. My reason is simple: authenticity. I wanted to find what my heart felt was most compelling to express.

I started thinking about my personal story and why I chose to be part of the Mayor’s Council on African American Elders (MCAAE.) Even my great-grandmother came to mind. I thought about her final days, bedridden in a nursing home after a stroke. Still, I could not produce a single word.

I asked myself what was going on. Why couldn’t I produce anything of substance connected to that experience? Given what I have seen firsthand these past few years while being homeless, I should have had much to say about how Black American elders are neglected in different ways.

Then it dawned on me. Maybe my creativity was being stifled because I was trying to fit into the status quo of sounding professional or politically correct, rather than being my authentic self. I move for a reason. My heart has to be in it. I have to see a problem that can be addressed or a gap that can be bridged.

So here we go.

Juneteenth is approaching, and while many people will be preparing to celebrate, I want to take a different approach. I want to use this opportunity to point to an underlying issue that still plagues America and is directly linked to the core reason Juneteenth is celebrated: delayed recognition.

“Celebration without repair becomes performance.”

Let’s take a step back in time. On June 2, 1865, 17 days before General Order No. 3 was issued in Galveston, “Confederate General Edmund Kirby Smith signed the surrender of the Army of the Trans-Mississippi aboard the U.S.S. Fort Jackson in Galveston Bay.”

Before Juneteenth, Texas had become a place where slaveowners tried to hold onto slavery as long as they could. As the Civil War moved across the South, many slaveowners fled westward into Texas with slaves, attempting to keep them beyond the reach of Union forces. By the end of the war, Texas still held one of the last large populations of Black slaves waiting for freedom to be enforced.

The ordeal of Juneteenth was a moment in our country’s history where, in 1865, time seemed to have been suspended for more than 250,000 Black slaves in Texas. Much of the country was already operating under the Emancipation Proclamation, which President Abraham Lincoln issued on Jan. 1, 1863. But freedom did not reach everyone at the same time. Texas would not receive that announcement until much later.

It would be Union Major General Gordon Granger who arrived in Galveston, Texas, with federal troops to enforce the end of slavery in the state. Maybe it was early morning when the news began to spread, or maybe it was late afternoon. The light, fresh breeze moving across the water was probably starting to stir in the beach town, almost as if the shoreline itself sensed the news before the people heard it.

In Major General Granger’s hands was General Order No. 3, a document that did not merely announce freedom. It revealed the conditions America was already placing around it.

The order read:

“The people are informed that in accordance with a Proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freed are advised to remain at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts; and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.”

And it would seem that many people, in that moment, most likely heard only one part:

“All slaves are free.”

This is why I struggle with Juneteenth. Not because liberation should not be honored, but because I cannot ignore how quickly freedom was surrounded by conditions. Slaves were told they were free, but they were also told to remain where they were, work for wages, avoid gathering at military posts, and expect no support in “idleness.” That does not sound like a nation preparing people for full freedom. It sounds like a nation announcing freedom while managing the consequences of it.

Out of one frying pan into one that was dressed up.

And when I think about Black American elders today, I cannot help but see the same pattern of delayed recognition. America often waits until people have carried decades of harm before their pain becomes worthy of policy language, public concern, studies, ceremonies, or funding. By then, recognition arrives late, and too often, repair arrives even later.

I have seen delayed recognition in the way elders are discussed, only after they have already been priced out, displaced, isolated, medically neglected, or left to navigate systems that were never built with their dignity at the center. By the time their suffering becomes visible, it has often already shaped their bodies, their families, their housing, and their sense of belonging.

That is why Juneteenth cannot only be a celebration for me. It must also be a question. What does freedom mean when recognition arrives late? What does honor mean when repair never follows? And what does it say about us if we can celebrate liberation in history while ignoring the elders still waiting to be fully seen in the present?

Because delayed recognition is not just something that happened in 1865.

It is still happening.

Calvin Lassiter is the Founder & CEO of MindFrames Systems Inc. and a member of the Mayor’s Council on African American Elders.