LYNN — City Councilor-at-Large and North Shore Juneteenth Association President Nicole McClain joined Attorney Jim Carrigan’s LCTV show, “The American Dream,” this week to discuss Juneteenth.
The show is “designed to give viewers a behind-the-scenes look at how public and private policy is developed,” according to Carrigan.
During the show, which ran for slightly less than half an hour, McClain discussed the history of the holiday, which commemorates the date when Gen. Gordon Granger and Black soldiers who were part of the Union Army during the Civil War came to Texas to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation President Abraham Lincoln had issued in 1863.
McClain also discussed Granger’s advice to formerly enslaved people that they remain on the plantations of their former owners as paid workers. McClain said that this did not represent true freedom.
“You’re telling them, basically, stay with the people who may have raped you, who may have beat you, who may have done all these things and now trust these people to pay you a fair wage,” McClain said. “They didn’t give them housing, they didn’t give them land, they didn’t give them any type of financial stability, they just said ‘You’re free to go.'”
The show airs Tuesdays at 8 p.m., Fridays at 8 p.m., and Saturdays at 7 a.m. on Comcast Channel 3 and Verizon Channel 38. It can also be watched online at www.Lynntv.org.
