QOTD: HOW WILL YOU BE CELEBRATING JUNETEENTH?

Whatever slavery was supposedly ended on that date, it was fully re-imposed in 1913 in a more “benign” yet insidious form.

Fried chicken, watermelon, cold malt likker, some Kools and watch Superfly, Sanford and Son re-runs with a little Moms Mabley thrown in. Auntie likes an old-fashioned Juneteenth.

Don’t sound bad, do it?

June what? Is that a summer version of kwatza or kwaghnza or
In our house we will be observing Father’s day. Funny how this Black Holiday is on Father’s Day when there are so few Black Fathers around. Coincidence?

I think around my house, we’ll just call it “Father’s Day.”

My County doesn’t even recognize it as a real federal holiday for county workers.

No day off, but I wouldn’t be shocked if an email goes out saying something about it.

I’ll celebrate when the communist are destroyed and we end Reconstruction (The Civil Riots Act of 1964 which discriminates against White males etc with Affirmative Action, Diversity etc).

June 17th is and always will be Bunker Hill Day. That’s what I will be celebrating.

I drove from Gary, Indiana, where I was raised, to Houston, Tx to get work on an offshore drilling rig. (Hopefully one NOT on fire.) I’d worked six months or so on a rig in a muddy field the previous year.

Making Houston about midnight and not wanting to spend for a motel only to get up early to put in applications, I slow cruised for a few hours in my old pickup.

Beaumont, Tx was asleep. There was a wooden row-building on the right. A little dilapidated. The kind back home, that would
house pool halls, bars ya could get killed in, and boxing gyms. Upstairs would have been the bowling alley where I set pins for a dime a line when I was a pre-teen.

And on the left? On the left was a ship. Just off the sidewalk. A friggin’ ship! Right there. Like it was parked or something. Well it WAS parked. Parallel parked. I was dumbstruck. No ships parked on the street in Gary. They’da got their hub caps stolen or something.

After maybe a half hour of being awestruck by this parked ship, an old (younger than I am now) black man came down the sidewalk on the building side. “Hey mister. Can a guy get work unloading a ship like this one?” “Sure.” Pointing to one of the doors on the row building he said it was the hiring hall. Be open in two hours. Go inside and have a seat. It was three AM. I went inside.

It looked like a basket ball court without baskets. There were chairs against all four walls.

Sure enough, someone came in through the back and raised the wooden hatch to reveal the business counter.

Told him I’d like to get work unloading a ship. He said put your hat on the painted line closest to the counter. I don’t wear hats. “Will work gloves do?” “Yeah. That’s fine. It’s just to hold your place. You’re first today. You’ll probably get picked.”

Cool. I got work. Seven bucks an hour. Decent. This was 1976 or ’77 Alex Haley’s made up Roots would debut in a few weeks. I got my pilot’s license last year and needed money to blow on plane rental at some small airport.

Within an hour or so there were a few dozen hats on the line behind my gloves.

Some here at TBP have discerned that ol’ Bindy is often a bit slow on the uptake. But even I was beginning to notice a pattern at the hiring hall when I noticed I was the only paleface out of two hundred full Texas Negro longshoremen. Kinda like back in Gary.

It was a segregated hall. Not officially but in fact. Some of you are beginning to see a Juneteenth tie-in. I got picked that day and everyday for the following month because the foremen noticed I was grabbing sacks all day with the best of the made union men.

It was loading the ships. Not unloading. Pallets of flour sacks, one hundred-forty pounds per, were lowered into the hold onto heavy duty dollies which we’d push to the walls and stack from floor level to a few feet over our heads. We teamed up for the highest sacks. When the floor was covered we’d begin a second story of sacks and a third etc. till the hold was full.

The union brothers voted me in as an ‘application man.’ That meant I didn’t have to put my hat on the line. We gonna integrate this bus. Application men were all picked before the first casual men. Had to pay forty dollars. That was a lot cheaper than the three-hundred I paid for a book at the Ironworkers back home, and the work was easier.

When the men began talking about Juneteenth coming up, I found out it was the day the Texas slaves learned about the emancipation proclamation months after it was known in most other parts of the South.

A couple of years later I finally saw Roots. Glad I didn’t have a tv at the time I was in Beaumont. I wouldn’t have shown up the next day or any day after.

And to be fair, I was well treated and accepted in that segregated longshoreman’s local.

It was probably thirty years before I heard of Juneteenth again.

Sort of like Baby’s First Birthday, this was Bindy’s first Juneteenth.

I don’t know, maybe try playing the knock out game

You mean COON-teenth.

I can’t think of a more egregious example of cultural appropriation.
Juneteenth is a Texas thing. A black, Texas thing. Let ’em have their thing.

Fucking white libtard assholes make me want to puke.

Fuck all of you haters.