Juneteenth and Drapetomaniac grantees!
Tomorrow, June 19th, Americans will celebrate Juneteenth for the first time as a federal holiday. This day commemorates June 19th, 1865, two years after the Emancipation Proclamation when the Northern occupying Army told enslaved Black people in Galveston, Texas not only that they were free, but that they had been free more than two years since the Emancipation Proclamation was signed. Commemorations of this date, or the day this news got to various places with black enslaved people throughout the South, started very soon after slavery was abolished, even sustained during Jim Crow. More recently the fight for this commemoration spanned at least 40 years.
We live in a time when our federal government is commemorating Juneteenth, Republican-run states across the nation are banning schools from teaching about why Juneteenth happened, and the worst federal Democrats are refusing to eliminate the filibuster, a tool constructed to uphold white supremacy and still effective at sustaining it to this day. And while I’m sure many Black people are happy about the passage, most of us would have preferred many other laws being passed and enforced.
I remember growing up celebrating Juneteenth, usually called Juneteenth Independence Day,” “Freedom Day” or “Emancipation Day.” My grandpa told me even though Black enslaved people were freed because of the Civil War, white slave owners didn’t tell their slaves about their freedom for years. We talked about it in hushed tones, because other than Roots, mass media had hidden America’s racist past, which required black people to pass it on amongst ourselves.
This brings me to a word I embrace that I’ll share with you-drapetomania. In 1851, American physician Samuel A. Cartwright Dr. invented the term ‘drapetomania,’ derived from the Greek words for “runaway slave” and “crazy,” in order to explain why enslaved Africans fled slavery. Yes, slaveowners desperately wanted to know why slaves would work so hard to escape, so they turned to mental health experts, who diagnosed that condition. And Cartwright promised that “with the advantages of proper medical advice, strictly followed, this troublesome practice that many negroes have of running away, can be almost entirely prevented, although the slaves be located on the borders of a free state, within a stone’s throw of the abolitionists.” I won’t share his brutal treatments.
What does drapetomania have to do with Juneteenth? Because those Black people Cartwright observed not only yearned to be free, but fought so hard for it, were so right about being against slavery because slaveowners did it not only when it was legal, but continued to do it even when it was illegal.
And, in many ways, CDT continues the drapetomaniac fight for justice because we fight for freedom, whether it’s yet the law, or whether that great law is enforced yet, because we know we must bend the law to ethics and justice, and not the other way around. People power is the way to do that, and that’s our funding strategy. Unlike most funders of any kind, and especially politics funders, we fund drapetomaniacs. And we ask our members to channel their inner drapetomaniac.
So..have a great Juneteenth, because those enslaved folk fighting for freedom were confirmed drapetomaniacs. And we will continue to strive to be in their company.
