Today is Sunday, June 18, 2023, Father’s Day. Since tomorrow marks the celebration of Juneteenth, the occasion when America’s last enslaved people learned of their freedom on June 19, 1865, in Galveston, Texas, more than two years after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, I thought I would lead today’s blog with an article concerning three myths about slavery in light of the federal holiday being observed tomorrow. The analysis is by John Blake for CNN and it’s entitled “As the nation celebrates Juneteenth, it’s time to get rid of these three myths about slavery.”

Juneteenth has since become known as America’s Second Independence Day, in which President Joe Biden signed into law the commemoration of this event as a federal holiday just two years ago.

“One of the largest myths that historians and storytellers have successfully challenged in recent years is that enslaved African Americans were docile, passive victims who had to wait until white abolitionists and ‘The Great Emancipator’ Abraham Lincoln freed them.” As a counterpoint to this magical thinking, there is the reality of Black soldiers playing a pivotal role in winning the Civil War.

So a major myth about the practice of slavery was that African Americans were “freed” after the Civil War ended. There is a popular perception that the formerly enslaved were freed after the Civil War was declared over, but many African Americans had to continually fight for their freedom because so many whites still tried to keep them in captivity and were willing to use deceit and violence to do so.

Even with the announcement of the Emancipation Proclamation in Galveston, Texas, in 1865, this did not stop former Confederate soldiers from trying to round up Black “runaways” to return them to their owners, though that term no longer had any legal merit. And white vigilantes tracked down and punished formerly enslaved people.

Thus the lesson from history is this: Slavery didn’t end with the Emancipation Proclamation, as Black people still had to literally fight for their freedom long afterward.

Our second myth posits that Africans came to America without any culture or civilization. When one mentions the practice of slavery, we have images of half-naked Africans stumbling onto American shores, struggling to learn to read and write in a strange and alien land.

Historian Leslie Wilson at Montclair State University in New Jersey debunks this myth, saying that Africans who came to the United States were fully formed individuals and did not need to be civilized. They arrived with their own cultures and specialized knowledge. Areas in which Black people had already changed American’s ideas of culture by the Civil War include concepts of architecture, burial, music, storytelling, and medicine, Wilson contends. She says, “Much of Southern culture is nothing more than blackness. It is the blues and jazz of the 19th century and the rock and roll of the 20th. It is the chicken and grits, the way that people rock in church or the cadence of the pastor.”

The third myth concerns enslaved Africans being brainwashed by a white man’s “pie-in-the-sky” Christianity. Thus a copy of what historians call a “Slave Bible” contains passages in which British missionaries deleted certain passages that may inspire liberation – about 90 percent of the Old Testament is missing, along with half of the New Testament. Theology professor Leon Harris at Biola University in California states, “They literally blacked out portions of the Bible that had anything to do with freedom, anything to do with equality, anything to do with God delivering folk.”

Therefore, there is the misconception that Christianity was successfully used to create docile slaves who were conditioned to heed New Testament passages as “slaves obey your earthly masters.” Malcolm X derided Christianity as a white man’s religion used to brainwash Black people to “shout and sing and pray until we die ‘for some dreamy heaven-in-the-hereafter,’ while the white man “has his milk and honey in the streets paved with golden dollars right here on this earth!”

The historical record shows that enslaved African Americans revitalized Christianity in many ways, discovering anew the missing passages in the Slave Bible, such as the Old Testament stories of God freeing the Israelites from Egyptian captivity. Blacks injected emotionalism into staid Christianity and an emphasis on ecstatic worship into evangelical Christianity that can still be seen today. “Negro spirituals,” often called the nation’s first musical form unique to America, continue to be sung throughout churches of all races and ethnicities today.

So, as it has been incorrectly assumed, Christianity did not remake African Americas, it was former slaves who remade Christianity.

Unfortunately, Juneteenth comes this year at a time when white educators and politicians – you know who you are, Ron DeSatan! – are passing laws that ban the teaching of Black history in schools that could make white students or others feel “discomfort.” How many students now will be able to learn about the resilience of the formerly enslaved? How many will just accept the stats quo of the historically inaccurate depiction of this stain on America’s history because they don’t know better, as teachers are shackled from teaching them the real truth behind what really happened after the 13th Amendment was passed outlawing slavery? Only time will tell. In the meantime, we have Juneteenth tomorrow.

Oh, I was going to write about Asteroid City, wasn’t I? It’s late here again, owing to Elliot and I having a fabulous day out in Huntington, Long Island. Originally, we were going to see another film called Daliland starring Ben Kingsley, but we went to a bookstore called The Next Chapter, located on New York Avenue, instead and had lunch at a diner in Syosset. We also drove to Marshall’s on Jericho Turnpike in order to replace the suitcase that Elliot threw out from our storage unit. He believed the suitcase was worn; it wasn’t. I had just bought it last year to replace another suitcase whose wheel came off outside the building. When I returned from having breakfast out this morning and discovered the suitcase missing from the unit, I unleashed a torrent of abuse on Elliot’s head and demanded he buy me a new one. And he did!

This new film then by Anderson was a total dud, in my opinion. It had a huge cast, everyone from Edward Norton, Bryan Cranston, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Jonathan Schwartzman, Live Schreiber, to Matt Dillon, even, but the lines the characters deliver in the film for the most part are delivered in a flat, inanimate manner that takes the fun out of enjoying the improbable story set somewhere in a southwestern town amid the Atomic Age of the 1950s. I have to say that the film is shot gorgeously in which the palette of the physical setting were vivid and brilliant. The plot, such as it is, follows Augie Steenbeck (Shwartzman) and his four children who stop in the town of Asteroid City in order to celebrate his son Woodrow (Jake Ryan), who has been named a finalist in the junior stargazing inventing competition. Steenbeck is a recent widower who has withheld the news of the children’s mother’s death for three weeks, but when their car breaks down and a life-altering experience involving the appearance of an alien forces everyone to stay in the town in a state of quarantine until it’s determined they are free to leave by the U.S. government, Augie finds himself smitten with move star Midge Campbell (Johansson) who’s in town because of her junior stargazing daughter. It all gets very confusing when the story opens up with the appearance of Bryan Cranston as an Edward R. Murrow character narrating a black-and-white scene with Edward Norton playing a writer called Conrad Earp (what a name!) who is actually the creator of the film we are about to see. It’s all about smoke and mirrors here; what is real and what isn’t. I just found the movie painfully dull and emotionless, and I can’t fathom what Anderson was trying to do here. So I would not recommend this film to anyone unless you are a fanatical Anderson devotee.

Happy Juneteenth tomorrow. Have a good week.

Oh, I will probably not be here tomorrow, since I’m seeing a new off-Broadway play with my friend “Gene” at 7:30 called Love + Science. Elliot declined going with us. It’s a play about the early outbreak of AIDS and its effect on several characters.

Stay safe and be well.