The New Juneteenth Holiday & Utah's Laws on Interracial Marriage (1888-1963) (Season 4, Ep. 9)

**Brad Westwood** (0:01)
Welcome to the podcast Speak Your Piece. This is a podcast about Utah's history produced by the Utah Department of Culture and Community Engagement. I'm Brad Westwood, Senior Public Historian. My job is to make the very best, the most interesting, the most accurate history about Utah, accessible to the widest audience. I hope this is the one place, the one podcast you get your Utah history fix.
Our subject today is Women's History. This is part of a small series that brings forward women's voices and history. My co-producer of this episode is public historian, Dr. Cassandra Clark, who is leading Utah State History's Women's Initiative. Our focus today is unpacking Dr. Patrick Mason's 2008 article in the Utah Historical Quarterly entitled The Prohibition of Interracial Marriage in Utah, 1888-1963. Now, this particular article can be found online and we'll put it in the show notes. It's Utah Historical Quarterly, Volume 76, Number 2
So welcome back, Dr. Cassie Clark.

**Cassandra Clark** (1:12)
Thanks, Brad. Thanks for having me back. I'm glad to be here.

**Brad Westwood** (1:14)
It's a fun little series. I think this is our second or third related to women's history.
Today, we're going to focus on this fascinating article. Tell us what this is all about.

**Cassandra Clark** (1:26)
Great. Thanks, Brad. I think the main goal that I want to do is to talk about Juneteenth. Utah as well as the nation has now formally acknowledged Juneteenth as a Utah State recognized holiday. I just want to contextualize Juneteenth and talk about how it fits into Utah's history, which is different than that broader narrative of what Juneteenth is.
By focusing on Dr. Mason's article in the UHQ, it brings the story of African-American, white and even racial relations in the United States into Utah's history and broadens it out, so there's a connection between those two things.

**Brad Westwood** (2:10)
One of the things I really like and we try to do on Speak Your Piece is, sure, we're going to be all about Utah's history, but we're inescapably part of a region and part of a nation and really part of the global experience. I think this offers that wonderful perspective.
Dr. Clark, Juneteenth is a relatively new holiday, and it's something that's come to the fore culturally in the last few years.
Let's give a little more background as to what that is.

**Cassandra Clark** (2:40)
Yeah, great. To be absolutely honest, I didn't know about Juneteenth until I got into graduate school, which shows how important it is that you and I are having this conversation and sharing the history of it.
I think most people that I've spoken to have never heard about it in any of their history classes until or in school until they got to college at least. So Juneteenth was the first official or not necessarily official but Juneteenth marks June 19th, 1865, which was the day that enslaved African-Americans in Texas were told that slavery had ended. It was two years after the Emancipation Proclamation had been signed and it was also two months after Confederate General Robert E. Lee had surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox. So why is this relevant? How does Juneteenth fit into this or June 19th fit into all of this?
Well the Confederates in Texas continued to fight all the way up until June 19th and there's a lot of like debate about why, you know, I mean, you know, conversation, communications in the 19th century was extremely slow. I mean, there's not a ton of completed railroad lines. The telegraph had not extended everywhere throughout the nation.

**Brad Westwood** (3:56)
Not to mention the adverse effects of war and all the destruction.

**Cassandra Clark** (4:01)
Especially in the South by 1865, you know, a lot of the South had been destroyed, especially with Sherman's March to the Sea, you know, like these types of things had had prohibited communication. There also is an idea that perhaps Confederacy didn't want to surrender in Texas.

**Brad Westwood** (4:18)
There was a persistence of the mission.

**Cassandra Clark** (4:20)
Yes.

**Brad Westwood** (4:20)
Even though mathematics had happened.

**Cassandra Clark** (4:22)
Yes. And when and the one of the most common misunderstandings about the Emancipation Proclamation is it's an assumption that on 1863, on January 1st, there had been this like all slaves were freed, you know, like slaves were then freed with the official recognition of the Emancipation. But in fact, that was untrue. The Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves only in Union occupied territories in the South.
Borderland states that had remained loyal to the Union that had slaves still continue to enslave African Americans, even though they were part of the Union.
And any Confederate territory like Texas that had not been overtaken by the Union up to that point still had slavery. And so it was a very limited idea of slavery. However, it's again an idea, you know, the Emancipation still federally and nationally recognized that slavery was wrong, which is a huge leap.