On Jan. 1, 1863, The Emancipation Proclamation became law in the United States. It declared that “all persons held as slaves … shall be … forever free and the …Government of the United States … will do no act … to repress such persons … in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.”

Unsurprisingly, Confederates continued their efforts to “repress such persons in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.” While many enslavers reluctantly read the Proclamation to the Black people on their plantations whom they were forced to free, Texas refused to capitulate. For two-and-a-half additional years, Black people remained enslaved throughout Texas, unaware that their counterparts elsewhere in America were free. On June 19, 1865, Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas and announced that all enslaved persons were free.

Juneteenth is the jubilant celebration begun by those newly freed Black Texans and shared by other Black people across the country, joyous because their many long years and generations of inhumanity at the hands of enslavers were finally over. Juneteenth is deeply important to Black Americans because all of us were not free in 1863, nor were most of us free in 1776. If one of us is enslaved, then none of us are free. We all became free(ish) on June 19, 1865 — that is our Independence Day.

This concept of collective sorrow, joy, and responsibility is foreign to most white Americans throughout history. Aggressive individualism and jealous hoarding of resources, power, and rights is synonymous with white culture everywhere on the planet, but particularly in America where the commitment to the god of colonialism still dominates white ideology and politics. Black people have been living under the American system of white supremacy since we were dragged here in chains. The U.S. has nurtured a paradoxical creed about Black lives. They brought us here against our will, but have resented us since we arrived. White enslavers demanded we give up our language, our family ties, and our very names, because our full presence was a condemnation of their actions. They exploited us while also harboring contempt for who we are and the ugly truth about themselves that our presence reveals. White people forced us to do the work they did not want to do themselves, but called us lazy. They kept us bound to plantations, yet feared our proximity lest we rise up and exact vengeance on them. Our enslavers forced us to cook their food but feared we would poison them, gave us the least-desirable scraps of food, and then became jealous when we made the food taste delicious. They sent us to fight their wars, then segregated us when we arrived on foreign shores alongside them. And when Black veterans returned to this country, they were denied the benefits they earned as soldiers, while the white veterans were rewarded with financial and educational supports.

Many white people, some of whom read this column, grouse that I should “get over” our enslavement and the generations of further segregation, violence, and death doled out to Black Americans up to today. They accuse Black Americans of wallowing in “victimhood” and then paradoxically complain that they themselves are victims — victims of the fact that Black people won’t shut up about the continuation of white supremacy and the deadly impact it continues to have on our jobs, our families, and our lives. White people lament that they are victims of having to hear the truth about how they continue to benefit from the legacy of slavery. They are happy to reap the individual privileges bestowed upon white Americans as their 30 pieces of silver for betraying their fellow Black Americans, but are infuriated by the idea that they also then collectively bear any responsibility for spending those 30 pieces of silver.

Even the idea that our country should celebrate the freeing of our last holdout of the horrors of slavery is met with anger from these white Americans, who feel that they are yet again victimized by Black Americans simply celebrating the fact that they are no longer permitted to enslave us. White Americans demand credit for not having been alive during slavery, but immediately prove what side they would have been on by protesting the notion that freedom for all Black Americans should be as fiercely and devotedly celebrated and defended as the day when white Americans were freed from the oppression of British rule. White Americans (who also were not present in 1776) are proud today to fly the American flag on the Fourth of July, dewey-eyed at the feeling of joy and pride at the freedom to be American. Yet they are indignant that our country would afford the same joy and pride for the freeing of Black Americans, who in their opinion rightfully should not only still be enslaved, but also be happy about it.

In 1900 NAACP leader James Weldon Johnson wrote the hymn “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” and it has become an anthem for Black Americans. There is profound hope in the lyrics, despite the reality that Black Americans in many ways are still only “free-ish” and therefore can only hope for a future that might one day afford us true freedom and equality. Yet in the hostile backlash that spews from white America at the very thought that Black Americans would have our own national anthem, there are echoes of the bedrock of white supremacy. Our joy stings them like salt on a festering whip lash. Every note we sing echoes in their ears like the screams of our ancestors torn from our homeland. Our jubilant celebration of a glorious day 160 years ago that allowed us all to believe that one day we might be unequivocally free on this tainted soil, rankles them. Many white Americans resent the reminder that our joy on Juneteenth is directly connected forever and always to the horrors their ancestors inflicted upon ours, and they resent the fact that our joy rises and persists no matter what is done to us. Our celebration of Juneteenth shames them. For white history is the history of the enslavers, and Black history is the history of all of us who survived and lived to sing and dance and celebrate with our ancestors.

Let our rejoicing rise high as the list’ning skies

Let it resound loud as the rolling sea

Tolley M. Jones lives in Easthampton and works in Greenfield.