The REAL History of Juneteenth (What They Didn't Teach You)

[00:00:00]there is an intentional attempt to dismantle all education in this country from K through 20 as we've witnessed very painfully with this administration and it's all for a particular end. They they want to be able to control people because they can't think their way out of a paper bag. And if you can't read well, you can't think well. Those two things go together.

[00:00:21]>> Ready. We're prepared. Do not give in to fear.

[00:00:26]We are fearless.

[00:00:28]This is not the time to be afraid. This is a time to stand up and fight back.

[00:00:34]And to resist any temptation for them to divide us.

[00:00:38]We're in this together. The rule OF LAW IS ON OUR SIDE. WE WILL NOT GIVE IN, not give up, we will not capitulate, WE WILL NOT BOW, WE WILL NOT BEND, WE WILL SURVIVE.

[00:00:54]>> SO, UM LET ME JUST fully disclose I never thought that Juneteenth should be a federal holiday because I don't feel that white folks should have the day off.

[00:01:03]I did >> [laughter] >> There's something inherently wrong about a day off for people to you know, I just feels wrong.

[00:01:13]>> Make them come. Make them come to the to the come to the educational program as as it should be.

[00:01:20]>> I mean if we could do that then it would be righteous, but it's not. They get the day off. They get a They and they get now they got sales, they got Juneteenth ice cream, they get to capitalize on it.

[00:01:30]I'm like, no. No, yes. Not only do we need to center the commemorative spirit of Juneteenth and be really, you know, in the history, but I don't think people should get the day off to celebrate any you know, who whose ancestors might have participated in our bondage. Mhm. Something feels wrong about that.

[00:01:48]>> Yeah.

[00:01:49]Yeah, I um I kind of agree. But I do end up whether they want to or not, I think a lot of them end up stewing um, cuz they, you know, either because they're angry that there is this day, um, they they do have to confront it. Or, um, so I I I don't know. I like it about that. But sometimes you just, I know for me, I I I appreciate the counterbalance.

[00:02:11]I have spent a lot of my career in public history spaces as a public historian, so I always am very interested, uh, on the of the occasions when we do history in public. And I I Juneteenth for me, on the one hand, >> [clears throat and snorts] >> I take it as a very necessary counterbalance to the 4th of July. But on the other hand, I I also have a gripe with Juneteenth, and I'd I'd be more than happy to talk a little bit about that. Um, my my gripe is that Juneteenth is for Texans. Uh, I'm a native Floridian. Um, I grew up celebrating an occasion known as May Day, or the 20th of May. That is the day here in the state of Florida that, uh, the Union General, uh, Edward McCook, came to Tallahassee, and he did a few things. He he planned a ceremony where he lowered the Confederate flag, raised the US flag over the Capitol, and then he read the words of the Emancipation Proclamation. And it's been the symbol of that day for the last 161 years that Floridians have celebrated their emancipation in the state. Um, these were huge affairs. There are families who have been culture keepers and tradition keepers, particularly in Leon County, um, Wakulla County, um, other counties.

[00:03:26]When you think about, uh, Florida in 19 1865, excuse me, understand that it's only kind of like the northern part that's really populated and settled.

[00:03:34]Uh, uh, and the majority of black population is in those what we call black belt counties. Uh, but that was ground zero for emancipation and emancipation celebrations in in our state. Um, and even more, when you get even more complex, here in the state of Florida, there were two areas that were under federal control that actually commemorated uh, emancipation on January 1st, 1863. It was in the Fernandina Fernandina area of Florida, as well as Key West.

[00:04:01]So, there's a very complicated history here in Florida, and there are complicated history throughout the South. And I, as a historian and someone who is not only, you know, lent towards accuracy, right? This is just a part of my training, but also, um I think about what we we pave in order to get on the Juneteenth bandwagon. We are rolling over, steamrolling over over 160 years of history, of effort, of local communities, all the church mothers and teachers and principals and adults who, uh, you know, brought out the barrels with the lemonade, who organized the ball games, who, uh, groomed the children so they could plait the maypole, who, uh, kept the tradition of the the drum rhythm uh, with the Hill family in Tallahassee, uh, that was beaten originally in 1865 on drums that had been discarded by by Union soldiers.

[00:04:57]So, there's this all this history that we miss, um, and there are other states that have similar things that also get steamrolled in order to, um, to celebrate Juneteenth. Uh, you know, you you can't compete with a a federal holiday. And and the ham-handed way that this was done, um, you know, it just it just there's a lot to to gripe about.

[00:05:20]>> Yeah.

[00:05:20]Uh, we're talking with Dr. Tamika Bradley Hobbs. Um, we're having a a a not a difficult conversation, but a necessary one, because, you know, you being a historian, history I was I just came back from Tulsa, and I've been talking about the Tulsa Massacre since I started on these airwaves 12 plus years ago, and I just learned something last week, you know, that I didn't know. And I've been talking about self-defense, you know, next time when we build we got to have self-defense. They had self-defense.

[00:05:54]And I didn't know that they were ready for the attack.

[00:06:00]And it was the bombs from the sky.

[00:06:03]And and brother Chief Ahmose II said, "You know you're losing when you have to fire bomb people from the sky." And I think about Nagasaki and Hiroshima. When when you're losing, you're going to drop bombs from the sky. And I thought about a community of black people that even factored that in.

[00:06:21]And still got decimated because at the end of the day these people have federally sanctioned bombs that they were able to drop.

[00:06:30]But it it it means that we are constantly learning. So, what was your entree into What was the story? Cuz it had to be a story that animated you to say, "I want to pull this thread and know more." What was that story?

[00:06:43]>> Um so, for me it was um being a freshman at my HBCU, Florida A&M University. And >> Rattler?

[00:06:51]>> Yes, Rattler all day. Orange and green.

[00:06:55]We um we were mandated at that time to everyone had to take African American history.

[00:07:01]And it was in that class that I just was at last confronted with all of the beauty, all of the struggle, all of the heroes and sheroes of our past. It it answered questions that I didn't even didn't even know I I had in my head just about the things I observed in my own family tree, the things that I observed in my neighborhood growing up. And um it absolutely revolutionized my thinking about my place in the world. And uh shortly thereafter I I changed my major.

[00:07:36]Um I I the other thing I'll say about that that as a 18 or 19-year-old I also realized that someone had made choices that this was information that I did not need to know in my K-12 education. It absolutely was was something that I needed to know. It It changed me forever.

[00:07:52]Uh and not only did I change my major, but I ended up working on campus at what was then the Black Archives. It was the old Carnegie Library built at the the turn of the 20th century. Really interesting story there. The city of Tallahassee um was offered money for the library by Andrew Carnegie and his foundation on the condition that the library would need to be segregated. The city of course rejected that.

[00:08:15]>> Wow.

[00:08:15]>> But the college accepted the money and they got a Carnegie Library built uh on the campus. And so um it had been retired. They had built a new building Coleman Library. And uh it was Dr. James Eaton, who was a historian teaching on the faculty, who had the idea in the '70s to start a museum. And so by the time I came along in the '90s, it was um you know, very popular. Uh he had amassed an amazing collection of museum artifacts and archives. And I began to work with him and I got bit by the bug.

[00:08:48]I knew I I wanted to do this work in a place like a museum because not everybody was going to go to college, not everybody was going to take a class, not everybody was going to read a book.

[00:08:58]But museums are incredibly important places having especially museums that don't have a a paywall. Uh it's a way that people can have a casual experience with history and learn something or have their curiosity piqued. And I knew that I wanted to uh to be a part of that. And so it's really wonderful for me all these years later now to be serving as the the regional manager / director uh of the African American Research Library and Cultural Center here in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

[00:09:29]>> I am we're we're not reading uh across the board. Uh there've been several stories of college students.

[00:09:36]There was one uh frustrated professor um who's like, "My students can't read.

[00:09:42]They just, you know, Harvard they you know, study these these children said that they haven't read a complete book at Harvard cover to cover like for fun or at all. And, you know, recently this this uh content provider has been out with words on a page like um silhouette and other words and going up to random young people and they don't they can't read the sentence.

[00:10:12]How do we How do we get people involved in culture and history when the words on the page aren't you know, it's not animating them at all. They're not they don't engage at all.

[00:10:27]>> Oh, that's a that's really painful to hear. I've seen some of the the headlines that you're referring to. Um really painful to hear. Very painful to hear and there are a couple things I have to say.

[00:10:38]First, I am I'm grateful that I'm from the graduate the the the generation that I am. Uh I love to read and at at my big age, I um the amount that I have read and the the depth of my vocabulary and my enjoyment of words is something I wouldn't trade for the world. Um I'm I'm grateful uh that I came along at the time that I came along. But, it also conversely makes me incredibly sad for for the young people uh that are coming. There've been so many games played with our education system um that are causing the literacy crisis. Uh there is an intentional attempt to to dismantle all education in this country from K through 20 as we've witnessed um very painfully uh with this administration. And it's all for a particular end. They they want to be able to control people because they can't think their way out of a a paper bag. And if you can't read well, you can't think well. Those two things go together.

[00:11:37]The other uh over over lying thing I kind of think think about a Venn diagram here is you have I I I've read uh Johann Hari's book uh Stolen Focus uh a couple years ago and it People I know people are sick of me. Anytime I you talk to me long enough, I'm talking about this book.

[00:11:55]>> I've done podcasts on it. Yeah, it's yeah.

[00:11:58]>> It's what he reveals about the impact on um the neurology in our brains based on uh social media and the fact that people are intentionally, you know, this is how they make their profit. So, they're they're gaming our brains to deprive us of our focus. And the one line that stood out to me that was just incredibly important as we think about it today is that our inability to focus as a society is undermining our ability to organize.

[00:12:24]And that kind of tells you a little bit about where we are in this moment as the black community is we I know um I'm grieving doubly. April 29th was a devastating day. Not only was that the date that the Louisiana uh the K- Kolay decision came down from the US Supreme Court, it was also the day here in Florida and in our legislature that they voted to redistrict illegally um you know, a mid-term uh non- um census uh data-based uh decision that is on top of what they did in 2022 to continue to erode uh black and or democratic uh power here in the state.

[00:13:07]Um so, you have that and then you have AI that's coming and um is just also doing a number on people's intellect. I I I have witnessed uh people reposting things that they don't understand is generated by AI and and representing it as truth.

[00:13:24]Um I We also know on the other end of the spectrum that people are using AI instead of using their brains.

[00:13:31]So, all of this taken together uh paints a very uh grim picture, I think, for the future unless we, you know, um focus on educate ourselves about and try to resist some of these influences.

[00:13:48]>> I've been um talking about where we are.

[00:13:50]We're in a particular time in history that they will be talking about for hundreds and hundreds of years, right?

[00:13:55]They're going to historians 100 200 years from now will say this was a period, right? I don't know what they're going to call it. It's going to be the age of something.

[00:14:05]I don't know if it's going to be dark ignorant. We already had the dark ages.

[00:14:09]This is but but if history rhymes >> Yeah.

[00:14:12]>> this >> I'd like to call it the great collapse is my >> collapse. Okay.

[00:14:18]Okay, let's let's pin that and and throw it into, you know, 20 40 51 or whatever.

[00:14:24]I think that because the pendulum swings this that that 15 14-year-olds are not happy.

[00:14:34]They they're not happy with what is being left with them. And they're going to revolt in a way that I don't think any of us are prepared for. And I think that they might just tune out the screens. I think they also see the deterioration and I think they also are unhappy with their their social lives because they don't know how to carry on conversations and it is frustrating to them and they don't like it. They don't like it. And and so they're going to say something about it. They're going to do something about it and I think they're going to get get to reading because that is the way out. Reading novels is the way out. They're they're going to find and discover that.

[00:15:09]And at that point it's going to be Katie bar the door. It's going to be a problem. Plus AI is not the answer because unfortunately these soulless people who created it have no so you couldn't give it all of the things and you need black people. If you want to really have AI.

[00:15:25]And black people kind of checked out right now. Y'all don't messed around.

[00:15:29]You're about to find out. But all of the things that you have, there's more to us cuz we are creation.

[00:15:35]So I looked at Starbucks. Did you see Star Starbucks um they had an AI tool that um for logistics. And so they fired their logistics team because this AI tool was going to do all of the things. And guess what? Guess what Dr. Hobbs?

[00:15:51]It had mistakes. Lots of multiple errors because part of logistics is also having some intuitive, you know, this may New York may be over it. Let me make a different choice. It's not just numbers in and numbers out. And AI can't make an adjustment in real time when things are going wrong. And this thing, much like that robot trying to dance Michael Jackson and fell up the stairs.

[00:16:15]It was a disaster and they had to abandon ship. They had to abandon ship.

[00:16:19]And I suspect this is going to happen as they keep building these data centers.

[00:16:22]And I I I think they're going to find out because again, you you can't reproduce creativity. You can only steal what's out there.

[00:16:32]>> We're ready. We're prepared. Do not give in to fear.

[00:16:36]We are fearless.

[00:16:39]This is not the time to be afraid. This is the time to stand up and fight back.

[00:16:44]And to resist any temptation for them to divide us.

[00:16:48]We're in this together.

[00:16:50]The rule OF LAW IS ON OUR SIDE. WE WILL NOT GIVE IN, not give up, we will not capitulate, WE WILL NOT BOW, WE WILL NOT BEND. WE WILL SURVIVE.