Latest news with #Freedmen'sBureau
Yahoo
27-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Juneteenth 2025: What to know about the federal holiday
Juneteenth is a federal holiday that recognizes the freedom of formerly enslaved Black people. The commemoration traditionally takes place on June 19 to commemorate the day in 1865 when Major Gen. Gordon Granger arrived in the state of Texas to share the news of the Emancipation Proclamation, announcing the official end of the Civil War. This year, the holiday falls on a Thursday. Here's all you need to know about the approaching celebration: Juneteenth was signed into law as a federal holiday on June 17, 2021, by former President Biden. He was surrounded by civil rights activists including Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.), the late Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) and Opal Lee. Opal Lee is known as the 'Grandmother of Juneteenth,' after walking 2.5 miles each year to symbolize the two and a half years it took for news of the Emancipation Proclamation to reach Texas. In 2016, at age 89, she walked from Fort Worth, Texas, to Washington, D.C., hoping to convince former President Obama to establish Juneteenth as a national holiday. Five years later, Biden completed the task and awarded Opal Lee with the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her advocacy work. The first Juneteenth celebration took place in 1866, one year after Granger's order. Some referenced the holiday as 'Jubilee Day' or 'Freedom Day' and gathered in homes, parks and communities to celebrate. The holiday was first listed on the calendar of public events in 1872 with the help of the government's Freedmen's Bureau agency for newly freed Black people. Later that year, a group of Black organizers in Texas pooled together $1,000 for the purchase of 10 acres now known as Houston's Emancipation Park, where Juneteenth celebrations are hosted to date. The Freedmen's Bureau recently digitized its search portal for archives from 1865-1872 to allow family historians and genealogists to research the history of their ancestors in the United States. On Juneteenth, the U.S. Postal Service, banks and the stock market will be closed. Nonessential government employees will also be granted the day off from work. Many people use the Juneteenth holiday as a time to reflect on the country's past. Cities and states across the country typically host educational programming to inform individuals of the 250,000 Blacks who gained their freedom in honor of the holiday. Celebrations may include readings of former president Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, cook outs, festivals and Miss Juneteenth contests across the country. Some may also sing the Black national anthem, 'Lift Every Voice and Sing.' Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
The Hill
27-05-2025
- Politics
- The Hill
Juneteenth 2025: What to know about the federal holiday
Juneteenth is a federal holiday that recognizes the freedom of formerly enslaved Black people. The commemoration traditionally takes place on June 19 to commemorate the day in 1865 when Major Gen. Gordon Granger arrived in the state of Texas to share the news of the Emancipation Proclamation, announcing the official end of the Civil War. This year, the holiday falls on a Thursday. Here's all you need to know about the approaching celebration: Juneteenth was signed into law as a federal holiday on June 17, 2021, by former President Biden. He was surrounded by civil rights activists including Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.), the late Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) and Opal Lee. Opal Lee is known as the 'Grandmother of Juneteenth,' after walking 2.5 miles each year to symbolize the two and a half years it took for news of the Emancipation Proclamation to reach Texas. In 2016, at age 89, she walked from Fort Worth, Texas, to Washington, D.C., hoping to convince former President Obama to establish Juneteenth as a national holiday. Five years later, Biden completed the task and awarded Opal Lee with the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her advocacy work. The first Juneteenth celebration took place in 1866, one year after Granger's order. Some referenced the holiday as 'Jubilee Day' or 'Freedom Day' and gathered in homes, parks and communities to celebrate. The holiday was first listed on the calendar of public events in 1872 with the help of the government's Freedmen's Bureau agency for newly freed Black people. Later that year, a group of Black organizers in Texas pooled together $1,000 for the purchase of 10 acres now known as Houston's Emancipation Park, where Juneteenth celebrations are hosted to date. The Freedmen's Bureau recently digitized its search portal for archives from 1865-1872 to allow family historians and genealogists to research the history of their ancestors in the United States. On Juneteenth, the U.S. Postal Service, banks and the stock market will be closed. Nonessential government employees will also be granted the day off from work. Many people use the Juneteenth holiday as a time to reflect on the country's past. Cities and states across the country typically host educational programming to inform individuals of the 250,000 Blacks who gained their freedom in honor of the holiday. Celebrations may include readings of former president Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, cook outs, festivals and Miss Juneteenth contests across the country. Some may also sing the Black national anthem, 'Lift Every Voice and Sing.'
Yahoo
20-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
5 Things You Should Know About the Nottoway Plantation's Horrid Legacy
The Black social media-verse has been ablaze with reaction to the burning down of Nottoway Plantation in White Castle, La. Officials believe the cause of the 160-year-old structure's destruction may have been electrical. But it is a place of history, and what was lost despite what it represented was a window into the past that allows us to examine what the place really was. So here are some things you should understand about the now-burned Nottoway Plantation: The property was steeped in slavery as an industry. Nottoway was built between 1857 and 1859 for John Hampden Randolph (1813-1883), a sugar planter who owned three other plantations in Iberville Parish, La.; Blythewood, Forest Home, and Bayou Goula. He came from a family of cotton planters in Mississippi and began planting cotton in Louisiana in 1841. He switched to sugar cane, and slaves constructed the 53,000 square-foot property, through which he amassed significant wealth, according to his own papers. Some Black people at Nottoway resisted, but others found further misery. By 1860, Randolph held at least 155 human beings in bondage there. Little is known about them to this day, but according to Freedmen's Bureau records show that at least 11 people escaped during the Civil War. As the Union army drew near, Randolph took about 200 slaves from Nottoway and his other properties into Texas to grow cotton. After the war, they were freed, but 53 of them contracted with him to return. Economically, Nottoway was cursed for generations. Postwar hard times hit the South, and the plantation was significantly reduced in size. After Randolph's death, the place changed hands a number of times due to foreclosure, crop failure, tax issues, the sale of surrounding land, and other problems. At least two later owners unsuccessfully tried to make Nottoway a sugar plantation again. It wound up in the hands of widow Odessa Owen, who lived there alone, unable to care for the mansion on her own. Millionaires tried to keep profiting from the legacy. Nottoway joined the National Registry of Historic Places in 1980, and after two more sales, it went to Australian businessman Paul Ramsey in 1985. He turned the property into a popular tourist resort. Ramsey died in 2014 after pouring $15 million into Nottoway to fix it, but it was sold to New Orleans hotelier Joseph Jaeger for $3.1 million in 2019. He was killed in an auto accident in 2024, and ownership changed again last October to Dan Dyess, a Natchitoches lawyer and preservationist. The new owner doesn't get it. Dyess has been quoted in the media as intending good things for Nottoway. He has said that he and his wife are 'non-racist' people who understand how people feel about its past, but had 'nothing to do with slavery.' 'We are trying to make this a better place,' Dyess said, according to the New York Post. 'We don't have any interest in left-wing radical stuff. We need to move forward on a positive note here, and we are not going to dwell on past racial injustice.' Madison J. Gray is a New York-based journalist. He blogs at For the latest news, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Mint
09-05-2025
- Politics
- Mint
California's reparations scheme is bad policy and worse politics
Since at least 1865, when Congress voted to set up the Freedmen's Bureau, Americans have debated how and whether to compensate former slaves. In 2020, when Donald Trump had reawoken the left and George Floyd, an unarmed African-American man, was murdered by a policeman, the idea of reparations—paying money to the descendants of slaves—became almost mainstream. Some Democratic politicians, under pressure from activists and eager to be on the right side of history, agreed to set up commissions to study the idea. A few years later, those commissions are coming back with recommendations. Cash reparations for slavery are not popular. Only 30% of Americans support the policy. Most of those alive today played no role in Jim Crow; none can reasonably be blamed for slavery. Nor are black Americans the only disadvantaged group: try telling an unemployed Appalachian coalminer why finite tax dollars should go on reparations rather than, say, better schools or public health. Still, unpopular policies are sometimes right. Are cash reparations for African-Americans one such case? Not long after slavery ended, the Freedmen's Bureau collapsed. Few freedmen received compensation and many ended up working as sharecroppers for their former masters in something close to indentured servitude. Emancipation was followed by the creation of a two-tier version of citizenship that lasted for a century. Until the 1960s, many black Americans lived in fear of terrorism, were shut out of many neighbourhoods and could not vote. Many were also excluded from supposedly universal programmes like the GI Bill. Plenty of the people who suffered directly from this system are still alive today. And in many cases their children and grandchildren have inherited disadvantages that have their roots in state-sanctioned discrimination. How much present racial inequality is due to that inheritance is impossible to quantify. But it is not zero and it is not 100%. The moral sentiment about reparations rests on these centuries of unfairness. Yet the cruelty of history is not the main argument. If the past were the same but there were no present-day racial gaps in income or life expectancy, the case for reparations would be weak. The main policy question, then, is how to help those who have been left behind. California shows how, in practice, it is impossible to create an actuarial table of injustice that can be consulted to determine how much cash is owed and to whom. California outlawed slavery when it joined the union in 1850, so its commission concentrated on making amends for current racial disparities. These are considerable, as they are nationwide. African-Americans die four years earlier than white Americans on average. (Perhaps less noticed is that black Americans have enjoyed the fastest gains in life expectancy over the past 20 years.) For the purpose of its calculations, the commission assumed that a life is worth $10m and, speciously, that all racial disparities in outcomes are due to racism, current or historical. It then calculated how much African-American Californians are owed. The maximum payout per person came to $1.2m. San Francisco, naturally, created its own commission, which put the figure higher, at $5m. The bill for the statewide scheme could exceed $800bn, though the commission deems even that sum to be merely a down payment. This comes as California faces a $32bn budget shortfall on an overall annual budget of $300bn. Then there is the difficulty of determining who is eligible for reparations. America, happily, is more racially fluid than when the Jim Crow era ended, which makes that hard. The commission's answer is to set up another body to determine individual claims, which is just to pose the question again. If the aim of the policy is to ease disadvantage, that can be done with race-neutral anti-poverty programmes. The expanded child-tax credit, which was part of Congress's response to covid-19, cut child poverty nationwide. It did the most for African-American children, narrowing disparities, and was popular. This is a route to the same end that is achievable. For Democrats, whose task is to build as big a coalition as possible to defeat Mr Trump's movement, it is hard to think of a policy better designed to set different groups of supporters against each other than cash reparations. Or one easier to lampoon in attack ads: 'Californian liberals vote to give Hollywood star $1m!' Gavin Newsom, the governor, appears to be looking for ways to quietly ignore the state commission. London Breed, San Francisco's mayor, has not endorsed the city council's proposal. Both should say clearly that they oppose cash reparations, and then propose policies to narrow disparities which most Americans would happily support.
Yahoo
07-03-2025
- General
- Yahoo
The Freedmen's Bureau: How Racist Lawmakers Thwarted an Early Attempt at Reparations
After more than two and half centuries of slavery, the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the 13th Amendment, Black people in America were no longer bound by the violent constraints of slavery — legally. Nonetheless, the transition from enslavement to life post-emancipation was not going to be easy. In an attempt to support this transition, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, commonly referred to as the Freedmen's Bureau, was established. Stay up-to-date with the politics team. Sign up for the Teen Vogue Take This year marks 160 years since that bureau's creation, which makes this a great time to recognize its legacy, its unfulfilled promises, and what we can learn from it all. Although this agency was short-lived — lasting from 1865 until 1872 — its impact was huge, including the pivotal role it played for Black Americans transitioning from slavery to life as freedpeople and the stories it continues to illuminate about generations of Black folks and American history. The Freedmen's Bureau was established on March 3, 1865, when the act that created it was passed by Congress and later signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln. As the National Archives explains, the bureau provided basic necessities like food, clothing, medical care, and temporary camps for shelter. It helped freedpeople legalize marriages and locate family members, as many Black families were routinely and violently ripped apart during slavery. It helped Black soldiers and sailors collect back pay, bounty payments, and pensions. The Freedmen's Bureau also helped freedpeople navigate labor contracts, sometimes helping them negotiate better terms than those offered that were still in alignment with the Black codes, laws passed by Southern state governments after the war that placed extreme limitations on the rights of Black people. According to the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), these laws 'required newly freed people to sign labor contracts with white planters on terms almost indistinguishable from slavery.' Education was another major focus for the bureau. It set up schools for newly freed Black people and poor white people. US Army officer Otis Howard, who was appointed commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau in 1865, used funds from the bureau to purchase land and construct campus buildings for the first historically Black college and university (HBCU), Howard University. The bureau also helped establish other HBCUs during Reconstruction, including Fisk University and Morehouse College. Another crucial piece of support the bureau offered was helping freedpeople purchase land. In the beginning, one of its most ambitious goals was land redistribution. On January 12, 1865, 20 Black leaders in Savannah, Georgia, mostly Baptist and Methodist ministers, met with General William T. Sherman and Lincoln's secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton, to discuss the needs of formerly enslaved people. That meeting resulted in General Sherman's Special Field Order 15, which set aside land on the southeast coast for formerly enslaved people. The order, which stated 'so that each family shall have a plot of not more than forty acres of tillable ground…,' led to the origin of the phrase '40 acres and a mule' — America's most famous attempt to provide some form of reparations for American slavery. 'Initially, the bureau planned to lease these lands — up to 40 acres — to the freedpeople for a set time, generally three years, and then allow them to purchase the land. This was the ultimate desire of the freedpeople,' Damani Davis, an archivist who oversees the National Archives' Freedmen's Bureau collection, tells Teen Vogue. 'They wanted and needed a permanent or long-term federal institution that would help them achieve their dream of economic independence and self-autonomy through ownership, rigorous educational opportunities, protection, and equality before the law.' By June of that year, around 40,000 Black people had been settled on the land set aside for them through Sherman's orders. Initiatives like land redistribution initially offered hope for economic independence and self-sufficiency, but were curtailed by President Andrew Johnson. In April, one month after the Freedmen's Bureau was established, Lincoln was assassinated, then Johnson took office. Johnson, a white supremacist, had land taken from many of the freedpeople and returned to former Confederates. By the summer of 1866, most of the land had been taken back. 'The will to truly support the transition of the Freedpeople from enslavement to self-sufficient citizenship was not there. The Freedmen's Bureau was never adequately funded or allowed to become a long-term agency committed to a true transition from slavery to freedom,' explains Davis. 'The former Confederates, and most white Southerners in general, opposed any federal support for the Freedpeople that would contribute in any way to their social, economic, educational, or political advancement.' Perhaps more importantly, though, political opposition also hampered the Bureau's effectiveness. The agency was initially supposed to exist for one year, but in 1866, lawmakers sought to remove the expiration date and expand support to include freedpeople and refugees everywhere across the United States, not just the South. Iterations of the bill were vetoed by President Johnson twice before the Senate and the House overrode the veto. On July 16, 1866, the Freedmen's Bureau Act of 1866 became law. But just seven years after its creation, in 1872, it was disbanded. 'Unfortunately, throughout its entire short existence," says Davis, 'it was completely hamstrung by those who opposed it and did not want it to succeed in fulfilling aspirations held by Black Americans and their supporters.' Though the Freedmen's Bureau ceased operations in 1872, it resulted in the creation of millions of records with the names and information of hundreds of thousands of formerly enslaved people. Labor contracts, marriage certificates, and reports on racial violence documented the lives and struggles of freedpeople during Reconstruction. These records are invaluable to historians, genealogists, and descendants of the formerly enslaved. 'The records provide a wealth of information that could be useful for those who are interested in learning about the beginnings of Reconstruction, the end of slavery, and a lot of precursors to the violence and the eventual triumph of Jim Crow,' says Davis. 'A lot of the precursors to things that happened later are highlighted within the Freedmen's Bureau records.' NMAAHC is currently leading a transcription project to digitize these records and make them more accessible to the public. Anyone can begin searching through the records online. This critical resource has revealed — and continues to reveal — previously unknown information about countless Black Americans, enabling their stories to be told, and fostering a deeper understanding of American history. The Freedmen's Bureau's achievements in education, legal advocacy, and recordkeeping laid the groundwork for future civil rights advancements. Its brief existence was a testament to the federal government's capacity to address systemic inequality. 'When looked at in the context of its limited resources, the political opposition that it faced, and the short timeframe of its existence, the Freedmen's Bureau can be viewed as a relative success in the work that it was able to accomplish and the services that it did provide,' says Davis. However, the agency's limited lifespan and unfulfilled promises do underscore the failure to provide reparations for formerly enslaved people and their descendants. With the reversal of land redistribution efforts, many freedpeople were left without the means to achieve economic independence. This has had a lasting impact, contributing to the many inequities faced by Black folks — including the racial wealth gap — that persists today. 'From the standpoint of Black Americans' broader needs, hopes, and aspirations, it was a failure," says Davis. "But that wasn't necessarily the fault of the Freedmen's Bureau itself.' Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue Want to read more Teen Vogue history coverage? 6 of the Most Famous Cults in U.S. History This Deadly Georgia Lake Holds Secrets About U.S. History Helen Keller's Legacy Has Been Sanitized Why We're Still So Obsessed With the Salem Witch Trials
