Juneteenth & Transitional Justice: A National Reckoning

David Alan Johnson is a second-year MPP student and Pearson Fellow at the Harris School of Public Policy and Research Assistant at the Transitional Justice and Democratic Stability Lab at the University of Chicago.

As the United States celebrates Juneteenth, a holiday commemorating enslaved African-Americans learning of their freedom from bondage in Texas in 1865, we must give their descendants whose community suffered from centuries of state sanctioned violence and broken promises of restitution a reason to believe in American democracy. Unfortunately, we have been unable and unwilling to meet this task, evidenced by our past and present entanglement with white supremacy.

When a new, multiracial government was elected democratically in the United States, white domestic terrorists representing different far-right groups gathered to see what they could do in retaliation. Not only were they upset at the results, but they succumbed to propaganda stating the election had to be fraudulent, that their country was on the brink of collapse if they did not fight against the alleged tyranny that diversity, equality, and equity presented to White Americans. After discussing the matter amongst themselves, they decided the only way to combat this perceived loss of privilege was through violence and anarchy.

In the days to come, they would storm and vandalize buildings where elected officials deliberated, terrorize and murder local citizens, and forever leave spaces created for all people tainted with bigotry, hatred, and callousness. The white men culpable of the insurrection never had charges brought against them. In fact, many of them celebrated openly, even going as far as saying the people who suffered from the coup’s effects were responsible for it taking place. Some elected officials spoke out against the abuses, but others attempted to cover it up as though it was not what it seemed. Many of the insurrectionists went back to their service in local, state, and federal agencies. For the government officials and citizens who endured this insurrection, their lives were forever traumatized by the events created by white supremacist and far-right wing ideology, haunted daily by the severity of racism and xenophobia in America.

I know what you are thinking – that I am next going to tell you all about the insurrection that took place at the U.S. capitol on January 6th. The sad truth is that 123 years before President Donald Trump convinced a mob of disgruntled supporters to disrupt the tallying of electoral votes in our nation’s most diverse Congress in history, white supremacist terrorists stormed City Hall in Wilmington, North Carolina to overthrow a multiracial government.

In 1898, 33 years after Juneteenth, nearly 200 armed men, comprising of local white supremacist terrorist groups such as the Red Shirts, stormed the City Hall in Wilmington and forced the Republican Mayor and Alderman to resign. They burned down the local Black-owned newspaper, destroyed Black neighborhoods, and forced many Wilmington citizens to flee for their survival. Between 60-300 Black Americans were killed. No one was arrested for their crimes.

Joseph Daniels, a leader in the insurrection who spurred momentum through racist propaganda as publisher of the The News & Observer, was later selected to be Secretary of the Navy and Ambassador to Mexico under Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Charles Aycock, another organizer of the deadly white supremacist insurrection, was elected governor of North Carolina three years later. Rebecca Fulton, an avowed white supremacist whose speech on lynching laid the foundation for the massacre, was later appointed to the US Senate in Georgia in 1922, becoming the nation’s first female senator. This event is considered to be the only successful coup d’etat in United States history, one that is rarely taught in classrooms in North Carolina or throughout the country. Many American citizens are unaware of this atrocity, let alone the insurrectionists who later ascended into public agencies.

After the insurrection at the United States Capitol on January 6th, some citizens were surprised to hear that many of the participants were affiliated with public agencies, ranging from state legislators, former police officers, Air Force veterans, and an active duty Marine. Others were shocked to see how the predominantly white insurrectionists were treated versus Black Lives Matter protestors following the murder of George Floyd in 2020. For Black communities, as evidenced in Wilmington, they have always seen the terror the United States allows its own citizens to endure without reciprocated accountability for culpable parties. Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass. said, “The experiences of [Jan.6] were harrowing and, unfortunately, very familiar in the deepest most ancestral way. And that includes… all Black Americans…” The U.S. government now claims to see the same. As of 2020, the Department of Homeland Security says white supremacist extremists are the “most persistent and lethal threat in the Homeland.”

While elected officials deliberate on whether to investigate the insurrection, our government must consider one question: can the United States reckon with the events on January 6th when they never held the white domestic terrorists in Wilmington, N.C. accountable? Before we can address the Washington D.C. insurrection, we must acknowledge the Wilmington massacre. Before we can discuss the lawlessness of former President Donald Trump, we must recognize the blatant racism of other presidents such as Andrew Johnson or James K. Polk. Before we can come to terms with the white supremacy of today, we must consider the virulent underbelly of white supremacy lying at the foundation of our country’s most sacred institutions.

Transitional Justice: A Framework for Accountability and Reconciliation

To repair past harms, guarantee non-repetition of those crimes, and reform institutions corrupted by white supremacy, we must have a formal transitional justice process. Transitional justice is defined as “a set of judicial and non-judicial instruments and mechanisms such as trials, truth commissions, vetting and lustration procedures, memorials, reparations, restitutions or compensations, and even amnesty and rehabilitation laws that redress the legacies of massive human rights abuses either during war, occupation, dictatorships or violent and suppressive conflicts and situations”.

Scholars, activists, and policy practitioners have been calling for a national transitional justice process in the United States for years, including reparations for chattel slavery and Jim Crow apartheid, a truth and reconciliation commission (TRC) to address systemic abuses against Black Americans and Indigenous people, and creating a national lustration commission to remove white supremacist and far-right wing ideology from our public safety institutions. Other countries, such as South Africa and their TRC, or Germany and its reparation programs, have made such norms popular, and we would follow in their footsteps of reconciliation if we had the courage to address our past.

This Juneteenth, the United States needs Transitional Justice

The United States will continue to exemplify hypocrisy if it makes Juneteenth a national holiday while allowing states to ban the teaching of critical race theory in classrooms. We cannot live up to our founding ideals of “holding these truths to be self-evident,” without first telling the truth about our past and present with racial subjugation. Transitional justice ensures we do just that, recognizing our wretched past, and ensuring our current institutions are equitable and reparative for those historically estranged from society. It will once and for all allow the United States to begin an endless chapter, with a title reading Never Again. It is something we must pursue if we are to ever be liberated from the boomerang of white supremacy.

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Olivera Simic, An Introduction to Transitional Justice (New York: Routledge, 2017), 1.