Breslin is the Joseph C. Palamountain Jr. Chair of Political Science at Skidmore College and author of “A Constitution for the Living: Imagining How Five Generations of Americans Would Rewrite the Nation’s Fundamental Law.”
This is the latest in “A Republic, if we can keep it,” a series to assist American citizens on the bumpy road ahead this election year. By highlighting components, principles and stories of the Constitution, Breslin hopes to remind us that the American political experiment remains, in the words of Alexander Hamilton, the “most interesting in the world.”
Every month has a credible claim to the yet-to-be-declared title of “American Freedom Month.” None more powerfully than June.
Perhaps it’s the excitement of the summer or the joy that comes with the longest days of the year. Regardless, it appears the advance and retreat of America’s political tides is only accentuated in June. The 30 days between the end of May and the beginning of July have done more to shape the American republic than any other.
Even from the nation’s start, June has been historically dynamic. On June 7, 1776, Virginia’s Richard Henry Lee stood before the Continental Congress in Philadelphia and resolved "that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved." We want to be free from oppressive colonialism, he argued. Four days later, Thomas Jefferson put quill to parchment and, after a few edits and redactions, the poetry of the Declaration of Independence gave birth to a new nation. Americans rightfully celebrate the Fourth of July as the country’s official birthday, but labor and delivery began with Lee’s resolution on June 7.
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America’s second birth of freedom occurred in June as well. On Juneteenth. On that day – June 19, 1865 – Abraham Lincoln’s promise of emancipation for all enslaved persons was finally fulfilled. It was then that Union Gen. Gordon Granger rode into Galveston, Texas, and read Executive Order No. 3: “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the [president] of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves.” More than two months after Lee surrendered at Appomattox, the scourge of chattel slavery was officially over. Now, every June 19 is Juneteenth.
June 6 — D-Day — has been a particularly memorable day for American liberty. In 1944, the United States and its Allied partners conducted the largest amphibious raid in world history. Liberating our overseas friends from German aggression was among the noblest, and most necessary, goals of America’s freedom mission. It also validated the country’s sole standing as the paragon of liberty.
Seventy-two years earlier, a different type of raid took place when Susan B. Anthony and a group of courageous women pushed their way into a Rochester, N.Y., polling location to cast ballots in the presidential election. It was illegal for women to vote then, but that was no deterrent for Anthony. She was arrested and, in June 1873,stood trial. The verdict? She was fined $100 for her unlawful action, a penalty she refused to accept. Morally dubious rules often produce fearless liberal pioneers.
And then there is the Supreme Court. June is a unique month in the court’s calendar, as the justices are completing their work and producing a large body of written opinions, leading to civil liberties experiencing unprecedented growth during the sixth month of the year. The right of privacy was recognized in Griswold v. Connecticut on June 7, 1965. Slightly more than a year later, on June 13, 1966, the accused were granted crucial protections through the court’s Miranda ruling. Freedom of speech and of the press were heralded twice in a single month in 1971 when The New York Times printed the famous Pentagon Papers on June 13, and six members of the Supreme Court defended the controversial publication 17 days later. Capital punishment was temporarily halted by the court in June 1972. The court’s landmark recognition of same sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges came on June 26, 2015. I could go on. Of course, in recent years, the court has condensed and even halted the expansion of individual rights — think Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization — but still. To this historical moment, the June balance sheet has been far more favorable toward individual freedoms, personal rights and fulsome liberty.
June’s claim on American Freedom Month would be incomplete without pausing to venerate those who died for the cause of freedom. Civil rights leader Medgar Evers was assassinated on June 12, 1963. Three civil rights activists — James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner — were murdered on or around June 21, 1964. Almost four years later, Robert F. Kennedy was gunned down leaving the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. The presumptive Democratic Party nominee for the White House, Kennedy had recently announced his commitment to broad civil rights legislation. They and so many other freedom fighters deserve our esteem.
America’s very symbol of freedom — the Stars and Stripes — was conceived in June. June 14, 1777, to be precise, the anniversary we now celebrate as Flag Day. It was then that John Adams faced the Continental Congress and resolved, “the Flag of the thirteen United States [shall] be thirteen stripes, alternate red and white, that the union be thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new constellation.” George Washington added a bit of flourish to Adams’description. “We take the stars from heaven,” he announced, ”the red from our mothercountry, separating it by white stripes, thus showing that we have separated from her, and the white stripes shall go down to posterity representing liberty.”
On June 3, 1964, the Rev. Martin Luther King stood before a rapt audience at Arizona State University and professed that the “arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice. ”Perhaps he had Adams’ “new constellation” in mind, or Washington’s white stripes of liberty, for just two weeks later, on June 19 —Juneteenth! — the Senate passed the most comprehensive civil rights legislation in American history. The entire political universe shifted that day, and for the better. For the far better.
As Americans prepare for another joyous summer season, let us raise a glass to June, “America’s Freedom Month.”
