Hey, Cousin: What I Saw On Juneteenth At Andrew Jackson’s Plantation

On Juneteenth, I traveled to the Hermitage, President Andrew Jackson’s plantation outside Nashville, to celebrate Black music. Neither Juneteenth nor Black music had ever been celebrated there before.

Lela Harris flew in from Maryland. She descends from Alfred, born enslaved on that land. When freedom came, he chose the name Jackson for himself. He asked to be buried beside the president, and he was.

Lela grew up with a tradition. Her family believes they descend from Andrew Jackson himself. Others say that cannot be, that Jackson fathered no children. The family carries the story. The records carry a silence.

My cousins are the Hemingses of Monticello. For centuries they said they descend from Thomas Jefferson, through Sally Hemings, the enslaved half-sister of his wife. They were told it was impossible. Then the science proved them right.

I told the crowd to call each other cousin, and I meant it plainly. If your family has been in Tennessee or Virginia a long time, the odds are good that — Black, White, or Native — you are kin to people who do not look like you. All afternoon you could hear it across that lawn. “Hey, Cousin!”

Cris Corley is an eighth-generation Tennessee farmer. His family included soldiers who fought alongside Andrew Jackson, and he grew up proud of that. Cris has fought for racial justice in Tennessee. He teared up that day.

Cris remembers when his elementary school in Alexandria, Tennessee, was desegregated.

A White father stormed in, using a slur for the Black children and swearing his kids would never sit beside them. The principal knocked him down where he stood. He decided that was better than letting a man block the schoolhouse door. Young Cris agreed.

The good people won that day.

Cris has a friend, Charlie High, who fights beside him today. Charlie remembers his own father coming home from the courthouse one day, excited. He had watched Diane Nash and the students from Fisk stand their ground. His dad then marched his young White children around the living room, the way Nash had marched, and praised them.

I am proud of the Hermitage team for not flinching, for digging into the hard questions instead of hiding from them. It is why I tell people we must step into the gray. We have always been more connected, and more human, than the history books let us believe.

Juneteenth was the right day to remember all of it. In a single instant, the government stopped calling human beings property and started calling them the political equals of the men who had owned them. There may be no other holiday that marks a turn so complete and so sudden.

So we stood on sacred and stained ground, and we sang, and we called each other cousin. We cannot control what was done to us, or for us. We control only what we build now.

Ghosts cannot heal us. Only we can do that.

The oldest truth my grandmother, Mamie Bland Todd, ever taught me was this: our people were always free. Strange, from a woman with three grandparents born into slavery. But it is both a basic Christian principle and a law of nature.

Her third great-grandfather carried that same fire. His name was Richard Bland. In 1766, he published a pamphlet asserting that very point against the British crown: under English government, all men are born free, regardless of what the King said.

Richard owned people even as he wrote it. His blood runs on both sides of the line. Two of his grandsons were half-brothers. They shared a father. One was born free. The other, Frederick, was born enslaved, six years the elder. Two brothers. One father. One owned the other.

That is my family. That is the country.

Our cousin, President Thomas Jefferson, had a word for that freedom. He wrote that we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights. Among them: liberty.

Unalienable. It cannot be sold, surrendered, taken away, or even granted. And like the Blands, his family owned their own kin. His words outran him too.

From the Revolutionary War to the Civil War to the civil rights movement, the fight was never to “win” our freedom. It was to make a nation finally recognize what was already true: freedom is a right of all humanity. Period. Full stop.

As we mark 250 years as a nation, that is still the work. To finally defend the freedom of every last one of our cousins. Because that is what we all are.

Hey, Cousin!

Ben Jealous is a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania and former president and CEO of the NAACP.