Juneteenth

 "If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to how far you can go.”

    James Baldwin

 

On June 19, 1865, in Galveston, Texas, Union General Gordon Grange informed former slaves that they were free. Almost immediately, freedmen began celebrating Emancipation or Jubilee Day with festivals featuring food, songs, parades, and speeches.  Most states have declared Juneteenth a Day of Observance, and, ironically, Trump’s idiotic determination to hold a rally in Tulsa on Juneteenth brought national attention to the date and furthered a movement to have June 19 declared a national holiday.  Better, methinks, to press for national health insurance, a living minimum wage, and election day being a national holiday with no more voter suppression.

Chesterton Juneteenth march by John Luke

 

Robert Cotton

Angel Smith

An impressive crowd numbering in the hundreds participated in a Chesterton Juneteenth march from the police station to Centennial Park.  Organized by Chesterton High School English teacher Becky Uehling and others, it featured speeches by African-American Valparaiso city councilman Robert Cotton and a poetry reading by CHS grad Angel Smith, now a senior at Stanford. Though the temperature was in the mid-90s, I marched the final four blocks and found a seat in the shade.  Cotton recalled neighbors in the Chicago projects, where he grew up, mourning the deaths of John Kennedy and Martin Luther King.  Now in his 60s, he substitute teaches in several communities, including Chesterton, in order to expose himself to students who may never have had a black teacher. Attesting to the importance of history, Cotton confessed he didn't know about Juneteenth until he was in his 30s.

 

Richard Russo’s 2012 memoir “Elsewhere” describes growing up in a New York mill town that, in miniature, mirrored Gary, Indiana’s sad fate in the face of deindustrialization, mechanization, and globalization.  Russo’s hometown of Gloversville manufactured not only top-quality gloves but other leather goods. By the 1970s Gloversville commercial district had become, in Russo’s words, “a Dresden-like ruin,” but during the 1950s on a Saturday afternoon “the streets downtown would be gridlocked with cars honking hellos to pedestrians.” Like Gary’s Palace Theater Gloverville’s Glove Theatre would be packed with adolescents.  Russo recalled:

    Often, when we finished what we called our weekly “errands,” my mother and I would stop in at Pedrick’s.  Located next to City Hall, it was a dark cool place, the only establishment of my youth that was air-conditioned, with a long thin wall whose service window allowed sodas and cocktails to be passed from the often raucous bar into the more respectable restaurant.  Back then Pedrick’s was always mobbed, even in the middle of a Saturday afternoon. Mounted on the wall of each booth was a minijukebox whose movable mechanical pages were full of song listings.  Selections made here – five for a quarter, if memory serves – were played on a real jukebox on the far wall. We always played a whole quarter’s worth while nursing sodas served so cold they made my teeth hurt. Sometimes, though, the music was drowned out by rowdy male laughter from the bar, where the wall-mounted television was tuned to a Yankees ball game, and if anyone hit a home rum, everybody in the restaurant knew it immediately.

Russo lamented that by the time he graduated in 1967, “you could have strafed Main Street with an automatic weapon without endangering a soul.”  The restaurant area of Pedrick’s had closed, and the bar was “quiet as a library.”

 

Ray Smock wrote:

One of the news items that did not get a lot of attention but that drove home the depths of systemic racism, and the many guises it can take, was the announcement by Walmart that it would no longer keep black cosmetics and beauty supplies under lock and key. The following is from a story in the New York Times of June 10: “Walmart will end its practice of locking up African-American beauty care products in glass cases, the retail giant said on Wednesday after a fresh round of criticism that the policy was a form of racial discrimination. Hair care and beauty products sold predominantly to black people could be accessed at certain stores only by getting a Walmart employee to unlock the cases, some of which featured additional anti-theft measures.”

When Sears closed its Gary store during the 1970s, it was making a handsome profit; but with South Lake Mall opening, corporate executives figured African Americans would come to Merrillville whereas most whites wouldn’t shop in Gary.  The lame excuse they gave Mayor Richard Gordon Hatcher: shoplifting, something easily remedied.

 

Ray Boomhower referenced an article Robert L. Sherrod wrote for Time about the heroism of African-American marines during the invasion of Saipan in June 1944.  Although most were serving as ammunition carriers and in beachhead unloading parties, many found themselves forced into combat.  Boomhower wrote:

    When the Japanese counterattacked the Fourth Marine Division near Charan Kanoa, twelve African Americans were thrown into the defense line and offered a stiff resistance, killing fifteen of the enemy. Sherrod quoted a white marine lieutenant from Texas as commenting on the incident: “I watched these Negro boys carefully. They were under intense mortar and artillery fire as well as rifle and machine gun fire. I saw no Negro running away. They all kept advancing until the counterattack was stopped.”

    Other black marines volunteered to carry badly needed ammunition to frontline units and joined fellow marines in hunting down snipers. Sherrod added the African Americans were credited with being “the workingest men on Saipan, having performed prodigious feats of labor both while under fire and after beachheads were well secured. Some unloaded boats for three days, with little or no sleep, working in water up to waist deep.”

    What did not make it into Sherrod’s published Time article was a remark one of the black marines made upon seeing army troops begin to land on the island: “It must be safe. Here comes the army.” Later, Sherrod learned that Admiral Chester Nimitz’s command in Hawaii had refused to allow such a statement, remarking that “no correspondents’ stories will be approved which reflect on Army in comparison with Navy or Marines,” and his story had “flagrantly violated” the restriction. For his part, Sherrod said he had included the quote to show the “high state of morale among Negro Marines.”

 

Anne Koehler wrote:

The current storm over statues and what to do with them brings me to another story from my childhood. The Aschberg is the highest elevation for our area, which is just under 100 meters or roughly 300 feet. Here stands the 21-foot tall statue of Otto von Bismarck. He was the Reichschancellor under Kaiser Wilhelm II and played a significant role in the fact that my home area remained German and did not become part of the Danish Kingdom. The statue was built and first erected on the Knivsberg in North Schleswig. When that part of Schleswig-Holstein was ceded to Denmark in 1919 as a result of a plebiscite, the statue was dismantled and moved south. The head was sawed off to make it fit into the railroad carriage for transport. A lengthy odyssey ensued; at times it was stored in a warehouse, at others in a barn. Different locations competed for the statue. In 1930 it was erected in its current spot. Bismarck proudly leans on his sword, looking into the hilly landscape, marked by fields surrounded by hedgerows. The hedgerows prevent soil erosions from wind and house birds and animals as well as provide firewood. The Aschberg and Bismarck were favorite outing locations. Sports and other events took place there. As children we would climb up on the side of the statue and sit on the crown to the right side. After the second World War precious metal was stolen from the sword for scrap.

 

Paul Kern replied: “Bismarck’s unification of Germany through three wars and his authoritarian rule left a dubious legacy. The Second Reich was based on Prussian domination of the rest of Germany. Bismarck liked to have internal enemies, first the Catholics in the Kulturkampf and then the Social Democratic Party in the anti-socialist law, policies that left Germany deeply divided religiously and politically. It was no accident that the fifty-five years after Bismarck were catastrophic for Germany.”

 

In the Chesterton Tribune “Echoes of the Past” column this item from June 18, 1895, a time when the country was in the throes of a Depression as devastating as the 1930s disaster: “The tramp element is getting thicker than ever.  It is not an uncommon occurrence to se 125 or 20 men lying around the water tower and living off the fat of thase land.”  Prior to 1895 most social reformers, such  Jacob A. Riis, thought tramps were lazy bums who shirked work.  The economic calamity convinced him otherwise.