Dear Legal Community:

As we enter the Month of June, it is important to reflect on the significance of Juneteenth to American History. Juneteenth is more than just a time for celebration, it is also a time for reflection.

I am the descendant of the Black slaves who built the United States over multiple generations and hundreds of years without any compensation or recognition for their sacrifice. I am the manifestation of the dreams of my ancestors who were denied basic human rights, educational opportunities, and economic opportunities because of the color of their skin, the texture of their hair, and their beautiful African features. I recognize that it is only because of the sacrifices and perseverance of my foremothers and forefathers that my version of the American Dream is possible. It is with this understanding that I reflect on the importance of Juneteenth to American History.

Black People Endured More Than 300 Years Of Slavery In The United States

Juneteenth commemorates the end of more than 300 years of the enslavement of Black people—my ancestors—in the United States. Although some historians cite 1619 as the beginning of slavery in what ultimately became the United States, that is incorrect. Slavery arrived in what became present-day Florida in 1539, when the slave trader and Spanish explorer Hernando DeSoto attempted to establish a permanent settlement and claim more territory for Spain.

We do not have much information about the Black slaves with DeSoto. A letter from Spain’s King Charles V dated April 20, 1537, gave DeSoto permission to take 50 Africans, a third of them female, to Florida. According to historian Jane Landers, DeSoto’s slaves included both Moors from Northern Africa and sub-Saharan Africans. Many of them deserted DeSoto to live with the Native Americans in Florida. We know that DeSoto abandoned some Black slaves during his expeditions, including two with known names. One named Robles, who apparently was Christian, was left at Coosa, Alabama, because he was too ill to walk, and another slave named Johan Biscayan was left at Ulibahali in present-day Georgia.

Over the succeeding decades, Black slaves helped build the Spanish colonial infrastructure, including most notably St. Augustine, Florida, in 1565, the oldest city in the United States. As historian Edwin Williams reported in a 1949 article that uncovered this history, “Negro slavery was first introduced into what is now the United States . . . many years before the ‘first’ Negroes were landed at Jamestown, Virginia.” The history of slavery in what became the United States was shaped by the battle between Spanish authorities keen on exploiting African labor and African resistance.

Florida came under British rule following the treaty that ended the French and Indian War. Thereafter, plantation slavery of the American colonial South—which was introduced by the British—began to take root. On the eve of the Revolutionary War, the population in Florida was roughly 1,000 White people and 3,000 Black slaves. Spanish rule returned to Florida over the period from 1784 to 1821 as the result of battles during the American Revolution that allowed Spain to recapture territory.

The United States purchased Florida from Spain in 1821. By the time that Florida became a state in 1845, roughly half its population was Black and enslaved, though there were a few hundred free Black people as well. The 1845 Florida constitution ensured that the emancipation of Black people would remain illegal, even giving the state the power to forbid the entrance of new free Black people from other states.

The enslavement of Black people in the United States was brutal and inhumane. Black people were torn from their families and their homes and forced onto slave ships where men, women, and children were chained together for months with minimal food or water or access to personal hygiene facilities. Once they arrived in what became the United States, Black people were forced to work against their will without compensation to build this country for more than 300 years. They were sold as property, raped, tortured, separated from their children, denied education, denied healthcare, denied civil rights, and murdered for sport. Black people are the only racial group in the United States designated as three-fifths of a human being in the United States Constitution.

Black People Endured More Than 100 Years of Jim Crow Segregation

Following slavery, Black people endured more than 100 years of brutal Jim Crow segregation and institutionalized racism that terrorized them and denied them basic human rights.

California was notorious in its Jim Crow laws targeting Black people and other people of color. Here are some examples of California’s Jim Crow laws, which were emblematic of similar racist laws across the United States following slavery:

Barred non-whites from testifying in any case where a white person was a party.
Barred non-whites from serving on a jury
Barred non-whites from voting
Barred non-whites from holding elective office
Barred non-whites from serving as judges
Barred non-white attorneys from questioning white witnesses
Barred non-whites from public schools
Barred non-whites from buying/renting property
Barred non-whites from being buried in certain cemeteries
Barred non-whites from restaurants, hotels, theaters, pools, hospitals, and beaches
Denied non-whites admission to bar associations
Barred non-whites from public transportation
Denied non-whites equal pay for equal work
Prohibited whites from marrying non-whites (Miscegenation).

The Complicated History Of Black People And Law Enforcement In The United States

As we reflect on Juneteenth, it is also helpful to examine the complicated history of law enforcement and the Black Community in the United States. The origins of modern-day policing can be traced back to the “Slave Patrol.” The earliest formal slave patrol was created in the Carolinas in the early 1700’s with one mission: to establish a system of terror and squash slave uprisings with the capacity to pursue, apprehend, and return runaway slaves to their owners. Tactics included the use of excessive force to control and produce desired slave behavior.

Slave Patrols continued until the end of the Civil War and the passage of the 13th Amendment. Following the Civil War, during Reconstruction, slave patrols were replaced by militia-style groups who were empowered to control and deny access to equal rights to freed slaves. They relentlessly and systematically enforced Black Codes; strict local and state laws that regulated and restricted access to labor, wages, voting rights, and general freedoms for formerly enslaved people.

In 1868, ratification of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution technically granted equal protections to African Americans —essentially abolishing Black Codes. However, Jim Crow laws and state and local statutes that legalized racial segregation swiftly took their place. It was not until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, that Black Americans were empowered to enforce their basic human rights in the United States.

By the 1900’s, local municipalities began to establish police departments to enforce local Jim Crow laws in the East and Midwest of the United States. Local municipalities leaned on police to enforce and exert excessive brutality on African Americans who purportedly violated any Jim Crow law, no matter how inhumane or nonsensical the law was. Jim Crow Laws continued through the end of the 1960’s.

During the Civil War, the United States Congress passed the Confiscation Act of 1862, which authorized Union troops to seize Confederate property, including Black slaves. The act also allowed the Union army to recruit Black soldiers. Months later, as the nation approached its third year of the Civil War, President Lincoln on January 1, 1863, would affirm the aims of the act by issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, which stated that “all persons held as slaves […] are, and henceforth, shall be free.”

The Emancipation Proclamation And The 2.5 Year Liberation Process

In 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation freed millions of Black slaves in Confederate states, but exempted those in the Union-loyal border states of Delaware, Maryland, Missouri, and Kentucky. These states held Confederate sympathies and could have seceded; Lincoln exempted them from the proclamation to prevent this. In April 1864, the United States Senate attempted to close this loophole by passing the 13th Amendment, prohibiting slavery and involuntary servitude in all states, Union and Confederate. However, the 13^th amendment was not ratified until December 1865.

As historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. noted, freedom was not automatic for Texas’s 250,000 enslaved people. “On plantations, masters had to decide when and how to announce the news — or wait for a government agent to arrive—and it was not uncommon for them to delay until after the harvest,” he wrote.

According to Professor Gates, newly freed Black women and men rallied around June 19th in that first year, transforming it from a “day of unheeded military orders into their own annual rite.”

Newly freed Black people celebrated the first Juneteenth in 1866 to celebrate liberation — with food, singing, and the reading of spirituals — and take pride in their progre...

California Lawyers Association

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