By Michael Mottern
When I was 10 years old, and my father asked me if I wanted to stay up to watch the 8:00 movie.? That 8:00 movie was the 1989 Civil War drama / action film Glory that won an Oscar for Best Actor Denzel Washington, but not for Best Picture, unfortunately! That 1989 film, I can safely say, changed my life radically. After seeing that film and those great performances by Washington, Morgan Freeman and Matthew Broderick, I wanted to learn about the Civil War… However I was a special ed student, and I also had the urge to go to my school library and take every book on the subject, especially the African-American experience.
That is why I attended the 2026 Juneteenth Gala in Buffalo and the fundraiser for the Buffalo Juneteenth committee, Every time I think of the Juneteenth Festival I think of federal troops liberating Galveston, Texas, a remote area of Texas, to remind the so-called good white citizens that the Emancipation Proclamation was passed, and the 13th amendment to the Constitution of the United States was now federal law! But I was there for something more personal. I go to the Juneteenth Gala to honor the old Federal Army troops of the United States Tennessee colored troops, USTC.
When nobody especially white troops in the Union Army would charge the point at any given time, black soldiers in the Union Army would immediately volunteer. The Tennessee colored units United States Army were there… Sadly they say the war took place in Virginia, they also say it went as far north as Gettysburg, but nobody understands the plight of African Americans living in border states where the Emancipation Proclamation unfortunately didn’t apply because it wasn’t in the Deep South. At that time, the Union Army was changing hands several times in border states like Missouri and Tennessee, a Union state during the war even and towards the end. Missouri, however, was a slave state in the Union and the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t apply until the 13th Amendment of the Constitution was passed! When the Confederates took over, they massacred the black civilians and soldiers without any Mercy, including old men, women and children. That is why I honored the border states’ black units during the Civil War because they fought bravely and with very little pay so it makes it analogous to a labor struggle.
Betty Jean Grant was a keynote speaker who invited me with an electronic ticket that was given to me by the Juneteenth committee. She ran for State Assembly and State Senate several times. However, top honors were given to assembly woman Crystal People Stokes by the founding membership of the festival committee. I got a handshake from congressman Timothy Kennedy of Buffalo New York.
Thinking about Juneteenth raises the question, what my hope for the next 50 years would be? That it should be easy to achieve racial equality and economic justice for all people! Let’s celebrate Juneteenth together and continue to remember who fought for those folks that were attending as well as myself as a magnet school kid from the inner city! And those who fought to end what was achieved in Galveston Texas in 1865: freedom, emancipation, justice and ending slavery!
Michael Mottern is First Vice-President of Social Democrats USA.
Michael Mottern writes: “Thinking about Juneteenth raises the question, what hope for the next 50 years would be? That it should be easy to achieve racial equality and economic justice for all people!” I daresay that if achieving either of these laudable goals were easy, racism and poverty would have long ago been swept into Trotsky’s dustbin of history.
The legendary democratic socialist titled his (second) autobiography “The Long Distance Runner”. Few of us will ever match Harrington in terms of activism or intellect. Nonetheless that title should remind us that political change is almost always a marathon and hardly ever a sprint. Ain’t nothing easy about it.
This should be counter-balanced with MLK’s Letter from Birmingham Jail. Let us be wary of becoming white moderates, complacent in our own freedoms and patient about those freedoms’ advance to all peoples.
Remember Dr. King’s statement that “the moral arc of the universe is long but bends toward justice.” Sounds like the statement of a “long distance runner” to me.
It’s been a minute since I looked at MLK’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail. I would be surprised, however, if there is anything in that piece of writing implying that the struggle for racial justice is an easy one.
Since I never said it was easy, or that MLK had said so, I’m not really sure whom you’re arguing with here.