The first celebration of Juneteenth began at the identical courthouse in Galveston, on the identical date where, one 12 months before, enslaved people in Texas learned that the war was over they usually were now free. On these same steps, Union Major General Gordon Granger had read, “The people of Texas 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 non-public rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves. …” On at the present time, June 19, 1866, the Emancipation Proclamation was read out loud, after which those gathered progressed to Methodist Episcopal South (now Reedy Chapel AME Church) for a public prayer meeting.
While history didn’t record the prayers from this gathering, that the event itself happened was noteworthy. Public prayer meetings by African Americans were rare during slavery. Though independent African American churches within the South existed in the course of the antebellum period, the vast majority of enslaved African Americans worshipped alongside the individuals who enslaved them. Slave owners on plantations and farms presided over church services that served their very own oppressive purposes. While some enslaved people preached, their sermons sounded as degrading as those of white ministers: Obey your master, don’t steal food, and so forth. Enslaved African Americans were keenly aware that any such preaching was a sham, a mechanism to try and keep them docile and complacent of their positions as enslaved individuals.
Enslaved African Americans, however, practiced their faith in organized secret meetings. At these “invisible institutions,” as renowned African American religious historian Albert J. Raboteau later called them, enslaved communities could sing their very own songs, preach their very own sermons, and pray their very own prayers. These meetings were continual acts of resistance against slaveholders’ power and slaveholders’ belief that they’d to make use of Christianity to make slaves obedient. These meetings also signified the lengths that enslaved people went to take care of their very own souls and the souls of their fellow yoked individuals.
Anderson Edwards, a formerly enslaved preacher in Texas, had this to say about what slave masters expected from slave preachers, and the way he ministered while away from the master’s watchful eye:
I been preachin’ the Gospel and farmin’ since slavery time. … When I starts preachin’ I couldn’t read or write and had to evangelise what massa told me and he say tell them n— iffen they obeys the massa they goes to Heaven, but I knowed there’s something higher for them, but daren’t tell them ’cept on the sly. That I done lots. I tell ’em iffen they keeps prayin’ the Lord will set ’em free.
Another formerly enslaved man, Wash Wilson, remembered that when enslaved individuals would begin to sing “Steal Away to Jesus,” it meant there could be a secret prayer meeting that night, as Raboteau recounts in Slave Religion. He recollected that “De masters … didn’t like dem ’ligious meetin’s, so us natcherly slips off at night, down in de bottoms or somewhere. Sometimes us sing and pray all night.”
These secret prayer meetings put enslaved people at risk. Slaveholders feared the prayers of the enslaved. Owners and overseers believed that enslaved people prayed against them, threatening enslaved African Americans with punishment in the event that they were found attending and holding these prayer meetings. Still, enslaved people used prayer as a weapon to fight for his or her freedom, believing that God, in his grace, mercy, and type windfall, would deliver them from bondage.
Those prayers continued after the enjoyment of the inaugural Juneteenth gave solution to the horror of Jim Crow. In 1900, Reformed pastor and lifelong advocate of African American rights Francis Grimké implored his congregation to wish “to beat the evil that’s in us, to interrupt the fetters of sin … and make us freemen indeed.”
Grimké also encouraged his African American flock to wish for racial progress: “Pray?” he preached from the pulpit of Washington, DC’s Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church. “Yes, allow us to pray without ceasing, that God wouldn’t only help us to construct ourselves up in the good and positive elements that go to make up a real manhood and womanhood, but in addition that he would help us together with his own great might to withstand with all of the energy of our natures this things which stand in the best way of our progress.”
Grimké also implored his congregation “to wish for those oppressing us.” In particular, he directed his church “to wish that God would have mercy upon them; that he would open their blind eyes, that he would show them the error of their ways … and make them conform to principles of right, of justice and humanity.” These exhortations exuded the spirit of Juneteenth prayers.
It ought to be no surprise that this fervent prayer tradition was central to the civil rights movement of the Fifties and Nineteen Sixties. Coretta Scott King recalled a prayer by her husband, Martin Luther King Jr., during a very rough stretch of the Montgomery bus boycott. One night he received a threatening phone call. Upset, he entered his kitchen and prayed, “Lord, I’m taking a stand for what I feel is true. The people need to me for leadership, and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they may falter. I’m at the tip of my powers. I even have nothing left. I even have nothing left. I even have come to the purpose where I can’t face it alone.” She later wrote in Standing within the Need of Prayer: A Celebration of Black Prayer that “when Martin stood up from the table, he was imbued with a latest sense of confidence, and he was able to face anything.”
In his book Juneteenth: A Celebration of Freedom, Charles Taylor features a “Traditional Juneteenth Prayer.” The prayer is within the sort of African American prayer—stylish, poetic, wealthy in biblical imagery. It opens with familiar words to any one who grew up in an African American church: “Father, I stretch my hand to thee—for no other help I do know. Oh, my rose of Sharon, my shelter within the time of storm. My prince of peace, my hope on this harsh land. I bow before you this morning to thanks for watching over us and caring for us. This morning you touched us and brought us out of the land of slumber, gave us one other day—thanks Jesus.” The prayer ends with a hoop of the last word freedom that lay ahead for each believer, contextualized inside African American trial and tribulation:
When I come all the way down to the river of Jordan, hold the river still and let your servant cross over during a peaceful down. Father, I’ll be searching for that land where Job said the wicked would stop from troubling us and our weary souls could be at rest; over there where a thousand years is but a day in eternity, where I’ll meet with family members and where I can sing praises to thee, and I can say with the saints of old, “Free finally, free finally, thank God almighty, I’m free finally.” Your servant’s prayer for Christ sake. Amen!
Today, on Juneteenth, the normal prayer service consists of prayers for the long run. This is smart. In 1865 and 1866, the brand new freed people likely had unclear notions in regards to the meaning of freedom. It is not any mystery that those had prayed for freedom would now pray for his or her future in freedom.
In recent a long time, churches have developed special Juneteenth liturgies. Some of those services draw from the African American Lectionary, where theologian J. Kameron Carter writes,
Juneteenth invites us to reflect upon the undeniable fact that in the course of the two-and-a-half-year period between Emancipation Day and Juneteenth, there have been still some people of color, people of African descent within the United States, who were still in bondage. They were still functioning as slaves, though legally they were free. Juneteenth, then, was for them a delayed celebration, a delayed enforcement of freedom. It represented a lagging liberation. This time lag of liberation is a metaphor of what it means to exist within the in-between of freedom, in freedom’s now-but-not-yet. In other words, Juneteenth points to the undeniable fact that liberation isn’t a one-time event. It is an ongoing project beckoning us to write down the vision of freedom and issue renewed proclamations of “freedom now.” Juneteenth signifies the undeniable fact that freedom and liberation is each behind and ahead of us.
In this long moment of anti-black racism that has manifested itself within the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, and the long list of unarmed African Americans killed unjustifiably by law enforcement officials, including Eric Garner, Oscar Grant, Alton Sterling, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor, Juneteenth is a commemoration of African American suffering and overcoming. It is a recognition that the prayers of the suffering and the oppressed will be answered, even when it ultimately takes centuries.
Eric Michael Washington, PhD, is associate professor of history and director of African and African diaspora studies at Calvin University, Grand Rapids, Michigan.
