Sermon Juneteenth Sunday June 16, 2024
Juneteenth (short for “June Nineteenth”) marks the day when federal troops
arrived in Galveston, Texas in 1865 to take control of the state and ensure
that all enslaved people be freed. The troops’ arrival came a full two and a
half years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. Juneteenth
honors the end to slavery in the United States and is considered the
longest-running African American holiday. On June 17, 2021, it officially
became a federal holiday.
According to the Texas State Library and Archives Commission, the
first large-scale Juneteenth celebrations happened on June 19, 1866.
Early celebrations featured a prayer service, a reading of the
proclamation, games, dances, and rodeos. These celebrations continued
in the late 19th century in Texas and beyond, according to the
commission. As African American Texans migrated to states including
Alabama, Florida, and California, they brought their tradition of celebrating
Juneteenth with them.
During the early 1900s, however, there was a decline in Juneteenth
celebrations in the southern states due to economic hardships caused by
the great depression and the rise of Jim Crow laws that disenfranchised
African Americans in southern states, according to History.com.
During the civil rights movement of the 1960s, there was a renewed
interest in the date when the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
designated the day as the solidarity day of the Poor People’s Campaign in
1968.
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During. that day, activists and civil rights leaders marched in
Washington, D.C., demanding the government take action to address
poverty throughout the country. This renewed interest in the history of
Juneteenth sparked a revival of large-scale celebrations in Texas
throughout the 1970s. In 1979, Texas Gov. William P. Clements Jr. signed
a bill into law that made Juneteenth an official state holiday. The following
year, Texas became the first state to observe and recognize the holiday
state-wide. In the years following, several states, including Massachusetts,
began to observe Juneteenth. In 2007, Gov. Deval Patrick, the state’s first
Black governor, signed a proclamation commemorating Juneteenth.
The murder of George Floyd and wider-scale Black Lives Matter
protests in 2020 brought new attention to recognition of Juneteenth as an
official holiday. Less than two months after his death, Massachusetts
officially recognized Juneteenth as a state holiday after Republican Gov.
Charlie Baker signed a budget bill with a provision that designated June
19 as Juneteenth Independence Day.
Because the bill was signed one month after June, bay-staters had to
wait until 2021 before celebrating Juneteenth as an official holiday.
Throughout 2020 and 2021, several state governors approved laws that
designated June 19 as an official holiday.
U.S. Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., introduced a bill to Congress on Feb.
25, 2021, to make Juneteenth a federal holiday. On June 17, 2021,
President Joe Biden signed the bill — the Juneteenth National
Independence Day Act — into law.
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“Juneteenth contains our county’s jagged edges and smooth curves,
its stains of servitude and bright spots of justice,” Markey wrote in 2023.
“Juneteenth is America, with all of its oppression and progress bundled
together. We have an obligation to unravel our country’s complicated
history and address its injustices. And that means we have an obligation to
observe Juneteenth.”
Now that you have a basic understanding of Juneteenth, I want to
take the time to talk specifically about two forms of slavery in the US and
then about our own context of Hebron and particularly this church.
Slavery sadly has been a part of the human condition throughout its
history. There has always been a need for societies to rely on a class of
people that were enslaved to provide the necessary labor needed to
advance the culture. A particularly onerous form of slavery was known as
chattel slavery which was the form of slavery that existed in the Roman
Empire and found its way to the new world where there was needed for an
abundant workforce to shape the land and harness it for agricultural
production.
Throughout its history, America has been plagued by two reprehensible
systems of forced labor: chattel slavery, the hereditary bondage of African
Americans rooted in racial prejudice, and indentured servitude, the
contractual exploitation of impoverished immigrants driven by economic
motives that was applied to poor or prisoners coming from England and
then to other poor and minority groups as they came to the American
colonies.
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While differing in duration and justification, both systems wrought
immense human suffering through degrading, dehumanizing treatment, and
harsh working conditions. The shadows of these oppressive institutions still
permeate modern society, seen in ongoing racial inequality, economic
disparity, and enduring societal biases. Chattel slavery treated humans as
personal chattels, as possessions on par with livestock or furniture, held by
their owners.
Slaves were devoid of legal protections or rights, treated as mere
tradable assets to be bought or sold as whim dictated.
Their designation as property extended to their lineage—generation upon
generation was born into bondage, their lot as property of their masters,
irrevocably cast.
Indentured servitude, by contrast, was often the recourse of the
impoverished who, in signing a contract known as an indenture, committed
to work for a specific term, commonly seven years, in exchange for passage
to the Americas. Unlike slaves, indentured servants were not reduced to
the status of property, and were afforded some rights and protections, albeit
limited in scope. Upon the fulfillment of their contractual obligation, they
were typically bestowed freedom and a parcel of land to facilitate their
transition to self-sustenance. However, their existence was fraught with
hardship, often being overworked, undernourished, and subjected to various
forms of exploitation.
Chattel slavery continued in the Americas in the United States, Brazil,
Cuba, and parts of the Caribbean. Chattel slaves endured extreme physical
and psychological violence, a stark illustration of unchecked exploitation.
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They were devoid of legal rights or protections and subjected to
dehumanizing treatment. Harsh punishments, sexual abuse, and forced
family separation were part of their existence. Their status as property
superseded any recognition as human beings with inherent rights—they
were voiceless against the injustice meted out to them.
Even with the end of slavery in the United States the need for a lower
working class never ended. Think of the Irish who came as low wage
laborers or nearly indentured servants; or immigrants from Eastern
European countries like Poland or the Slavic nations who upon their arrival
worked in the mines and were not considered white and therefore inferior to
the white ruling class. My own family from Slovakia came to farm untamed
farmland and populate northern Wisconsin on Lake Superior.
This practice is alive today with the debate of use of incarcerated
persons, immigrants, and migrant workers. While we must have good
immigration policy and almost had something this year until one person
stopped all the progress being made when a solution, while not perfect, was
hammered out on Capitol hill. This man did not want a bill to pass that
would have solved the problems because it interfered with his own election
prospects if that issue were not on the table. I am not being partisan; this is
simply the truth of what happened.
Another inconvenient truth is that without a steady supply of migrant
workers coming from south of our border our entire food system would
collapse. Migrant workers continue to be essential workers needed by
farmers across our nation at harvest time.
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When I was a teen, teens harvesting cherries every summer, but we
were not allowed to pick the sweet cherries only the sour because they
could not trust us not to eat them. So, they relied solely on migrant workers
who came for that work. they were right, We would have gorged ourselves
on those luscious cherries. I come from an area known as the fruit belt.
60% of cherries harvested in our country come from my area.
Now about our church. Our church was the 5 th or 6 th Anglican Church
of England church established in CT. Both our parish and St. James in
Poquetanuck were founded in 1734 with a charter given by King George II.
The Peters family in Hebron was one of the prominent families in the
community. Their son Samuel Peters went to England and became a priest
was the first vicar of this parish. He owed outright 20 persons. As our
presiding bishop Michael Curry said when he was with us, owned by law but
not by grace. They were legally his but not preordained by God in some
natural social order that many believed at the time.
Cesar Peters, an enslaved Black man was one of these people owned
by the Peters family. He was purchased when he was a child and raised in
the family home along with Samuel Peters (the future vicar). Cesar was
obviously very cleaver. After he was saved by the town’s people from being
sold, he sued the man who tried to sell him and won the lawsuit. He used
the money from the suit to purchase the home of the man who tried to sell
him which is now an archeological site in town and the location of the
witness stone in town. Earlier Samuel’s mother sold him to her son Samuel,
the priest who grew up with Cesar. Cesar remained a devoted Anglican
throughout his life. His offspring would have been baptized as Anglicans.
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Samuel Peters who opposed the revolution and is the antagonist to
Alexander Hamilton in the famous Broadway production of Hamilton
returned to the U.S. and was elected as the first bishop of the new
Episcopal Church in Vermont, but never seated for some reason. His grave
is cemetery behind this church along with many Peters family descendants.
Today, marks an important chapter in this ongoing story. Our parish
being home to many of the enslaved persons of the Peters family through its
history has a special responsibility to remember them. During this service
we will do a ceremony of water libations. The ceremony has its roots in
African and early Black culture. Libation ceremonies often occur during
Black or African wedding ceremonies to honor and celebrate the couple’s
heritage and ancestors. We will do the same today led by our garden
committee. At that time, we will do seven prayers and offering of water on
this Japanese maple tree that will be planted in our memorial garden as a
tribute to the enslaved members of our parish community. We are
collaborating with John Baron to help us with the list of names of those
enslaved and their immediate descendants with a plague that we will install
sometime in the future, maybe next Juneteenth.
My friends, I have talked a long time, but it is important to know the
past, especially at a time when certain members of our country our trying to
silence these stories, remove them from curricula at school or remove
books from libraries. We need to tell these stories because they enrich us
all and shed a new light on those who have lived in the shadows for too
long. God bless us all and may God bless each of you this day for being
here. Amen.