Freedom Day Reads

Good Day, Sky Dancers, and Happy Juneteenth!

June is rapidly becoming my favorite month.  We’ve been celebrating Pride all month and are doing Juneteenth.  You can smell the white beans, andouille, and rice coming down the hall.  I realized so many things in the last two days about this neighborhood which was developed after the Louisiana Purchase in 1812.  Enjoyment was mostly possible because the tourists have gone. Temple and I danced in the streets for the third Sunday of Pride Tea. I am now a fan of Dancing Queen which I used to flip the channel to avoid back in the day.

My Dentist office defines the magic of the gumbo pot of our country. My hygienist and dentist are second generation from the South Vietnam Diaspora. The office area and the patients are racially diverse.  This would have been impossible not that long ago. The second thing is I thank all of the Congress and administrations that continue to support Medicare. I do not know what I would do with out it.

We’re in the midst of an extremely long and dangerous heatwave. We cannot stop using fossil fuels fast enough. This is the second year of this and it’s not normal at all. There are so many things you can experience if you just take time to look around you and see the daily sites and people that are part of your neighborhood.  I guess I should’ve spent more time reading Golden Books and watching Mister Rogers and Sesame Street.  It’s all here.

John Blake from CNN has this to say about the history of slavery that formed our country. “As the nation celebrates Juneteenth, it’s time to get rid of these three myths about slavery.” 

Temple “Tempie” Cummins stoically stares at the camera with her arms folded in her lap, sitting stiffly in a chair in her dusty, barren backyard with her weather-beaten wooden shack behind her. Her dark, creased face reflects years of poverty and worry.

The faded black and white image of Cummins from 1937 was snapped by a historian who stopped by her home in Jasper, Texas, to ask her about her childhood during slavery. Cummins, who did not know her exact age, shared stories of uninterrupted woe until she recounted how she and her mother discovered that they had been freed.

She said her mother, a cook for their former slave owner’s family, liked to hide in the chimney corner to eavesdrop on dinner conversations. One day in 1865, she overheard her owner say that slavery had ended, but he wasn’t going to let his slaves know until they harvested “another crop or two.”

“When mother heard that she say she slip out the chimney corner and crack her heels together four times and shouts, ‘I’s free, I’s free,’ ” Cummins told the historian, who recorded her story for a New Deal writers’ project that collected the narratives of the formerly enslaved during the Great Depression. “Then she runs to the field, ‘gainst marster’s will and tol’ all the other slaves and they quit work.”

Tempie Cummins, who was formerly enslaved, shared her story with a historian who recorded it for a New Deal writers’ project.

That story is one of the first recorded memoires of an experience that would inspire the creation of Juneteenth, an annual holiday celebrating the end of slavery that the US will commemorate this Monday. It marks the moment in June of 1865 when Union troops arrived in Texas to inform enslaved African Americans that they were free by executive decree. Many people like Cummins in remote areas of Texas and elsewhere did not know that they were free as their White owners hid the news from them.

Juneteenth has since become known as “America’s Second Independence Day.” Now a federal holiday, it will be celebrated by parades, proclamations, and ceremonies throughout the US. Though it commemorates a moment when enslaved African Americans were freed, the US is still held captive by several myths about slavery and people like Cummins.

One of the biggest myths that historians and storytellers have successfully challenged in recent years is that enslaved African Americans were docile, passive victims who had to wait until White abolitionists and “The Great Emancipator” Abraham Lincoln freed them. Black soldiers, for example, played a pivotal role in winning the Civil War. This new understanding of slavery has led to a rhetorical shift: It’s no longer proper to refer to people like Cummins as simply “slaves.”

“There’s been a shift in the historical community attempting to not define the period or the people by what was done to them in the sense that their identity becomes a noun, a slave, but rather that they are that they were in the process of being enslaved,” says Tobin Miller Shearer, a historian and director of African American Studies at the University of Montana.

“There were slavers who did that to them,” he says, “but there’s more to their identity than what was being done to them.”

Yet other myths about slavery persist, in part, because of the sheer enormity and brutality of slavery.

“The enslavement of an estimated ten million Africans over a period of almost four centuries in the Atlantic slave trade was a tragedy of such scope that it is difficult to imagine, much less comprehend,” Albert J. Raboteau wrote in “Slave Religion: The ‘Invisible Institution’ in the Antebellum South.”

So many events in our Country’s history are shameful.  Covering them up only serves the same masters who want to keep every one who is not like them oppressed and worse off or in a form of servitude.

In 1838 Cherokee people were forcibly moved from their homeland and relocated to Indian Territory, now Oklahoma.  They resisted their Removal by creating their own newspaper, The Cherokee Phoenix, as a platform for their views.  They sent their educated young men on speaking tours throughout the United States.  They lobbied Congress, and created a petition with more than 15,000 Cherokee signatures against Removal.  They took their case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that they were a sovereign nation n Worcester vs. Georgia (1832).  President Andrew Jackson ignored the Supreme Court decision, enforced his Indian Removal Act of 1830, and pushed through the Treaty of New Echota.
In 1838 Cherokee people were forcibly taken from their homes,  incarcerated in stockades, forced to walk more than a thousand miles, and removed to Indian Territory, now Oklahoma. More than 4,000 died and many are buried in unmarked graves along “The Trail Where They Cried.”

Vanessa Carr Kennedy (My Dear Friend)
Drag Queen Story Time at Longview Gardens Family Day. Note, no children, or parents were harmed in the filming of this movie.

A lot of this history has the same roots.  “Opinion: The Supreme Court is making religion an all-purpose excuse for ignoring the law. First it was wedding cakes, and now it’s wedding websites. Conservatives who oppose same-sex marriage are testing the line between religious freedom and unlawful discrimination.”  This is from the L.A. Times and Xiao Wang. Remember, there are Evangelical Christians that support genocide in this case and likely for others.

Looking for a federal law to be declared unconstitutional? Religion may well be your best bet — and that’s true regardless of how “real” your religious beliefs are.

That’s part of the thinking behind one case the Supreme Court heard this session and will resolve soon. In 303 Creative vs. Elenis, the court is considering the constitutionality of a Colorado statute prohibiting most businesses from discriminating against LGBTQ+ customers. Lori Smith, a Christian webpage designer, had wanted to expand into the wedding website business — but only for opposite-sex couples, a plan that would have violated the Colorado law at issue. Her lawyers made the case on free speech grounds, but given Smith’s religious beliefs, “religious freedom” represents an undeniable backdrop to the suit.

The 303 Creative case is no outlier. Religion-based claims have proliferated in recent years, and plaintiffs have often won because courts have almost invariably found their religious beliefs to be sincerely held. Meanwhile, the burden of proof for the government — that it is not unduly interfering in religious practice — has become much harder to prove.

A string of recent Supreme Court cases demonstrates how religion offers litigants a ready path to disobey laws without consequence. In the 2021-22 term alone, the Supreme Court decided several high-profile cases that affirmed religion’s supremacy.

In Kennedy vs. Bremerton School District, the justices determined that a high school football coach could not be placed on leave for violating a rule against public prayer. In Carson vs. Makin, it held that Maine was constitutionally required to subsidize religious schools. And in Ramirez vs. Collier, it postponed the execution of an inmate after he asked, at the 11th hour, that his pastor lay hands on him — despite having previously explicitly disclaimed the same form of relief.

Then, in a narrow 5-4 decision last September, the court left in place a New York state court decision requiring Yeshiva University to recognize an LGBTQ+ student group over the school’s purported religious objections. Ruling on technical grounds, the majority directed the university to first seek relief in state court. But four dissenting justices would have granted review to vindicate the university’s 1st Amendment rights — and those justices say that the university would “surely” win if the case comes back up, after state proceedings conclude.

How did these results come to be?

In the conventional understanding, religious exercise was cast off as an almost disfavored right. Courts were, historically, generally willing to let the government prevail whenever public policy and religion came into conflict. Now though, when the court says that government action affecting religious exercise must satisfy “strict scrutiny” — a notoriously difficult burden — it actually means it.

But that’s not the full story. Courts aren’t just making it harder for the government in these cases; they’re also making things easier for plaintiffs.

Plaintiffs must in theory show that their religious beliefs are sincerely held before strict scrutiny can kick in. This requirement dates to a 1944 decision, United States vs. Ballard, which for many years served as an effective gatekeeper against cries of “religion” casually trumping the law.

But in practice, this requirement has been hollowed out since at least the early 1990s.

How is it that so many of us–to include women–so definitely way up over 50% are now being subjected to disenfranchisement and not included.  Meanwhile, we’re stuck in this Rule of Law Soap Opera because a bunch of idiots who voted for this man and set up laws to disenfranchise us.  They also stacked courts so that the government has more say in what happens with women’s bodies than we do.  How is this the land of the Free?

This is from The Hill.  I pity judges who have to order things that any lawyer should stop his client from doing as a normal party of a case. “Judge orders Trump not to disclose evidence in documents case.” 

A federal magistrate judge Monday agreed to a motion from the Justice Department to block former President Trump from disclosing information relating to the Mar-a-Lago case, after prosecutors said the investigation remains ongoing.

The order sides with the Justice Department in allowing Trump to see evidence collected in the case — including classified documents — but only in the presence of his attorneys.

It also blocks him from disseminating any information from the case with reporters or on social media, mirroring a similar order agreed to in the hush money case being prosecuted by authorities in New York.

“Defendants shall only have access to Discovery Materials under the direct supervision of Defense Counsel or a member of Defense Counsel’s staff. Defendants shall not retain copies of Discovery Material,” Judge Bruce Reinhart, who approved the warrant to search Mar-a-Lago, wrote in the order.

The Justice Department in its Friday request said that restrictions were required, as its investigation could yield additional arrests.

“The materials also include information pertaining to ongoing investigations, the disclosure of which could compromise those investigations and identify uncharged individuals,” the department wrote.

Now is the time for us to stand together.

Happy Freedom Day!  Independence Day comes up next!  Do you know where your civil liberties and civil rights are going?

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?