Title
Honoring and recognizing the national holiday of Juneteenth in the City of Saint Paul.
Body
WHEREAS, Juneteenth, also known as Emancipation Day, Freedom Day, or Juneteenth Independence Day, commemorates the emancipation of American descendants of chattel slavery in the United States; and
WHEREAS, on June 19, 1865, Union General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, historically known to be where the remaining American descendants of chattel slavery were and announced the end of the Civil War and the emancipation of all enslaved people, over two years after President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation; and
WHEREAS, Union General William T. Sherman’s planned to give American descendants of chattel slavery “forty acres and a mule” was among the first and most significant promises made - and broken - to African Americans. As the Union army gradually took over Confederate territory, there was a question as to what freedom really meant for emancipated slaves. Without property, money, or an education, most did not have a clear or immediate path toward economic independence; and
WHEREAS, after the abolishment of slavery, American descendants of chattel slavery experienced extreme disparities through Jim Crow laws, sharecropping, lynching, redlining, segregation, mass incarceration, forced segregation, mass atrocities in Tulsa and Rosewood, and many other forms of systemic oppression that impact Black Americans today; and
WHEREAS, in Saint Paul, systemic discrimination was perpetrated through redlining and racial covenants, access to housing, environmental injustice and the removal of Saint Paul’s Rondo neighborhood - the center of Saint Paul’s African American business, residential, spiritual and cultural life - for the construction of Interstate 94; and
WHEREAS, In 2023, the City of Saint Paul established the Saint Paul Recovery Act Community Reparations Commission, as envisioned, will make significant progress toward repairing the damage cause...
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