Vendor A. Allen on Juneteenth

Juneteenth, a great day, is observed on June 19th. The holiday commemorates the day that the last slaves were freed in the United States, in 1865, 2½ years after President Abraham Lincoln ordered their independence with the Emancipation Proclamation and two months after Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered.

But what does freedom mean if you have no education, no property and no economic tools to be self-supporting after the trauma of being taken from your homeland (Africa), stripped of your identity, culture, and manhood, and forced into slavery for hundreds of years?

It’s not just enough to say, “OK, now you are free.”

How can you be free with no means of being economically independent and self-supporting through your own efforts? Blacks were put in a lose-lose position, “between a rock and a hard place,” because they had no independent survival skills and no economic support. The only means of survival was to look to the slave owners for support. This is where another form of slavery came into existence. It was called sharecropping, but it is really a form of indentured servitude.

This arrangement was only marginally better than slavery. Sharecroppers were kept in an endless cycle of debt and poverty.

I personally agree with Union Gen. William T. Sherman’s plan to give 40,000 newly freed families 40 acres (the Army threw in mules where available). Without property, money or an education, most did not have a clear, immediate path toward economic independence. President Lincoln OK’d the idea to distribute land confiscated from Confederate landowners. But after Lincoln was assassinated, his successor, President Andrew Johnson, reversed this policy.

In January 1865, after he had conquered Savannah, GA, Sherman asked 20 Black ministers, “In what way can you best take care of yourselves and how can you assist the Government in maintaining your freedom?”

They responded, “The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land and turn it and till it by our own labor.”

Much like StreetWise.

We don’t just tell a panhandler or cup shaker with their hand out to get a job. We help them to become self-supporting through their own contribution. The opportunity to become an entrepreneur – by having a hand up, not a hand out – is like the old Chinese proverb: “Give a man a fish and he can eat for a day. But teach a man how to fish and he can eat for a lifetime.”