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WPCNR NEWS & COMMENT. By John F. Bailey June 19,2025:
June 19 is a day that is more important than ever today.
It is in a time when the political climate is attempting to reframe the image of America to downplay the role of diverse ethnic and inclusivity of different nationalities in building America.
The anti-DEI effort seeks to give the white settlers and leaders of the old South the lead role in American history.
America’s bloodiest war was the civil war — fought because the southern states leaders mostly aristocratic landowners who bought slaves to till their plantations and kept slaves in bondage for 200 years using them to build their businesses. The cotton industry used them as free labor and treated them like property to be used for whatever whim that satisfied them.
The novel Gone With the Wind the book published in the 1930s white washed the antebellum south as idyllic a harmonious family of white aristocracy and their slaves. The movie also promoted this image of the south. Both book and the movie made of it projected not the true history of slavery and horrifying true nature of slavery.
The book softened the way slavery was, sweetened it with good relations between slaveholder and slaves. Though somewhat unintentionally the best seller and movie performed a public relations effort across the country to lift up the white race role in building America and misleadingly glamorized how the ruling elite of America treated the people who worked for them—free for life.
The “masters” underpaid them. Whipped them. Made them live in squalid conditions. I have seen the slave quarters on President Andrew Jackson’s property in Nashville. I saw a building that housed 19 persons, smaller than my first apartment.
If you want to believe slavery was ok. It was not. Slavery has long been the best source of labor.
Slavery was the way civilizations were built for the last 7,000 years.
if you conquered a tribe or an empire, you enslaved the people and used them as free labor. To build your ziggurats, palaces, baths, forums, pyramids, tombs.
The monuments of The Roman Empire so glamorized by history courses i took built their monuments, the forums, the roads, the arches the markets, their palaces with captured slave labor. Romans did not work. S laves did. The Persian Empire, the Greek city states, they all used slaves.
America was the first nation to outlaw slavery when Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves.
It is celebrated annually on June 19 to commemorate the ending of slavery in the United States.
Today is the day when Major General Gordon Granger ordered the final enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation in Texas at the end of the American Civil War.[8][9]
Slavery came to an end in various areas of the United States at different times. Many enslaved southerners escaped, demanded wages, stopped work, or took up arms against the confederacy of slave states. In january 1865, congress finally proposed the thirteenth amendment to the United States Constitution for national abolition of slavery.
By June 1865, almost all enslaved were freed by the victorious union army, or abolition laws in some of the remaining U.S. States. when the national abolition amendment was ratified in December, the remaining enslaved in Delaware and in Kentucky were freed.
After the Civil War, President Andrew Johnson, a southern sympathizer, adopted policies that allowed southerner leaders to return to govern and the policy of Jim Crow began and gangs of whites terrorized former slaves. When President Ulysses S. Grant assumed the Presidency he rounded up and prosecuted the raiding gangs and repressed the violence toward the former slaves.
However prejudice towards blacks, and other immigrant races continues, labor practices paid low wages 80 hour work weeks and the corporate leaders of business made them work long hours, employed child labor.
The union movement arose because of the way workers were exploited by the “Captains” of industries Standard Oil, the owners of the railroads, (where President Grover Cleveland sent in Federal Troops to stop the Pullman Strike because the mail could not go through and Federal troops killed strikers).
Sadly prejudice against people of color, immigrants continues through today.
Today the banks, the insurance industry, the healthcare industry, the real estate industry, the financial investment industries the drug companies, continue to practice their businesses by the owners for the owners and for the biggest bottom line and stockholders benefit and fire employees when necessary to show profits.
How do they do that?
The Uria Heeps of American business continue practices that by their present practices prevent the poor and the disadvantaged whether persons of color or white, legal immigrants or persons just starting their careers are given unfair demands to advance, high costs of education, usurious loans and high loan interest rates because the Uriah Heeps make more profit that way. They rig the system
Slavery was and is, the most barbarian practice. No Captain of Industry could stand it.
Now we have a more insidious continuation of the utter disdain and sang froid of policies that today’s “Captains of Industry” share with the plantation owners.
Today’s congressmen and women, and Senators, who should know better and judges who cannot judge, and yes, cabinet members think nothing for the people whom they share and treat the same way the slaveowners of the past did down through the decades, that have been used to take advantage of people. Because they can.
The fight for truth, justice, and the American way is not over.
The have-nots have been traditionally treated poorly by American business, in a sense it is not prejudice against any one group, but it is prejudice against the poor all poor people. And of course women of all races or people the establishment leaders don’t approve of, whom business likes to exploit and want to keep in their place and continue being exploitees.
The role of the impoverished, the minority, the have-not is to work for the Captains of Industry, making the most money as possible for the “Captains of Industry.” Be paid as little as possible. Given benefits that hardly cover what they need.
Meanwhile, the Captains of Industry break laws, discriminate, cheat and are admired for doing it, glamourized by Hollywood, even. Tough nasty business leaders are admired.
It is still the way it is in the land of the free and the home of the Brave.
You have to be brave, courageous to be a have-not and survive.
The powerful run things to keep have-nots not having anything.
Have-nots are tough, brave determined and never give up.
The book There is No Place For Us, by the intrepid Brian Gladstone, (Crown Publishing) documents in horrifying detail the experiences of 5 families trying to live in Georgia and the legal fees apartment owners are charge that the state has enacted that have resulted in people who have jobs that are so low-paid they cannot afford a home or rental of their own.
So Juneteenth celebrants, the fight is ongoing.