The modern United States received its crowning star when
President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed a proclamation
admitting Hawaii into the Union as the 50th state.
The president also issued an order for an American flag
featuring 50 stars arranged in staggered rows: five six-star
rows and four five-star rows. The new flag became official
July 4, 1960.
On or about August 20, 1619, “20 and odd” Angolans, kidnapped
by the Portuguese, arrived in the British colony of Virginia and
were then bought by English colonists.
The exact date is not definitively known (a letter from the time
identified the ship’s arrival coming in "the latter part of August"),
but this date has been chosen by many to mark the arrival of the enslaved Africans in the New World—beginning two and a half
centuries of slavery in North America.
In the end, 246 brutal years of slavery had an incalculable effect
on American society. It would take another century after the Civil
War for racial segregation to be declared unconstitutional, but the
end of state-sanctioned racism was by no means the end of racism
and discrimination in America.
On August 19, 1791, the accomplished American mathematician
and astronomer Benjamin Banneker wrote a letter to then-
Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson.
Jefferson corresponded prolifically with luminaries from around
the world, but Banneker is unique among them: the son of a free
Black American woman and a formerly enslaved African man from Guinea, Banneker criticizes Jefferson’s hypocritical stance on
slavery in respectful but unambiguous terms, using Jefferson’s
own words to make his case for the abolition of slavery.
Banneker himself was born free in what is now Ellicott City,
Maryland, and was encouraged in his studies of astronomy
and mathematics by the Ellicotts, a Quaker family who owned
a mill and much of the land in the area.
Phillis Wheatley Peters (c. 1753 – December 5, 1784)
Phillis Wheatley, the first published African American poet, used
biblical themes to persuade believers in Christ to abolish slavery.
Born around 1753 in western Africa, Wheatley was sold to a slave
trader at only seven years of age. Quickly distinguishing herself
as a remarkable student, she finally secured her emancipation in
1773.
She once wrote, “In every human Breast, God has implanted a
Principle, which we call Love of Freedom; It is impatient of
Oppression, and pants for Deliverance; and . . . the same
Principle lives in us.”
Statue of Phillis Wheatley in Boston by Meredith Bergmann, dedicated in 2003.
In what is now known as Juneteenth, on June 19, 1865,
Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas with news
that the Civil War was over and slavery in the United
States is abolished.
A mix of June and 19th, Juneteenth has become a day
to commemorate the end of slavery in America. Despite
the fact that President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation
Proclamation was issued more than two years earlier on
January 1, 1863, a lack of Union troops in the rebel state
of Texas made the order difficult to enforce.
The holiday is considered the "longest-running African-American holiday"[ and has been called "America’s second Independence
Day."
