June 19, 1865, twenty years after Wittenberg College was founded, news of the Emancipation Proclamation finally reached all the states at the end of the Civil War. This was the day that Major General Gordon Granger enforced the freedom of all enslaved peoples in Texas, the last state to be reached after Congress approved the Thirteenth Amendment in January of that year.
I have to admit that I only learned of Juneteenth and its importance within the last decade. As a child of the 70s and a product of much higher education, it would have been reasonable to think that such an important date, a date celebrated as independence day by so many of my dearest and closest friends and neighbors, would be well known to me. It is ironic that news of equality and freedom should take so long to be known and received.
When I arrived at 九一麻豆制片厂 just over a year ago, I discovered great encouragement in reading the history of this amazing institution. Founded upon the Christian faith and Lutheran traditions, I was struck by the fact that, even as the issue of slavery was being hotly (and eventually violently) debated in our country, Wittenberg College did not exclude African Americans from enrolling. Yet neither was it founded upon abolitionist principles. Ezra Keller himself shares his own struggle, both inward and outward, as he rode a train from West Virginia to Ohio and heard news that a man seeking freedom from slavery had been arrested and was being held on the same train.
鈥淚 remarked to the company, that I felt it my duty to get out, and endeavor to rescue him. I was entreated not to do so 鈥� that I could not succeed, and might make myself liable to imprisonment on my arrival at Cumberland. It was stated that a colporteur had lately been arrested on suspicion of being an agent for the abduction of slaves. I was compelled to bear it as patiently as I could. A Methodist minister of Arkansas advocated slavery, which was as great a trial to my feelings as the sufferings of the miserable captive.鈥�
Keller鈥檚 conflicting feelings and lack of action could only be afforded by a free person. As a minister and a scholar of the Bible, I suspect he might have borrowed Paul鈥檚 own words in self-recrimination: 鈥淚 do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.鈥� (Romans 7:15)
Our society continues to wrestle with equality and justice, even to the point of debating whether Juneteenth should be recognized and celebrated. For my part, I have been shaped by my Christian faith and the Bible, the study of which has been my career. In those ancient texts, I read that all humanity has been created in the image of God, that 鈥渁ll have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God,鈥� and that all are also set free through Jesus Christ. This is my faith, my belief and 鈥� I pray 鈥� my practice.
I know that not everyone shares my faith; we do not all accept the Bible as authoritative, yet as Americans we all stand upon the foundation of our Constitution and its Amendments. In just a few more days, we will celebrate the 250th anniversary of our Declaration of Independence. It took King George a while to hear the news of our self-proclaimed freedom. Eighty-nine years later, it took six months for the news of the freedom of all Americans to reach the westernmost states. News of our freedom, social, political, and spiritual, is often slow in coming and even slower to realize in our lives. Still, let us press on toward the goal. Let freedom ring, for all.
Christian M. M. Brady, DPhil (Oxon.)
President