Departments

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Juneteenth

  • SOURCE: The Conversation
    6/16/2023

    Texas Politicians Want to Erase What Happened Between Juneteenth and Jim Crow

    by Jeffrey L. Littlejohn and Zachary Montz

    Joshua Houston, long enslaved by Sam Houston, recognized that the collective work of securing freedom only began with the announcement of emancipation, and that teaching the state's history honestly was part of the struggle for an egalitarian society against people determined to stand against it. 

  • SOURCE: New York Review of Books
    6/16/2023

    Juneteenth has Gone National—We Must Preserve its Local Meanings

    by Tiya Miles

    Juneteenth celebrations have long been couched in local Black communities' preserved rituals that express particular ideas about heritage and the meaning of freedom. While a national commemoration of emancipation is welcome, history will be lost if local observances are swamped by a national holiday.

  • SOURCE: SPLC Learning for Justice
    6/12/2019

    Teaching Hard Histories Through Juneteenth

    A celebration of freedom should put the work of the people who fought and struggled to achieve it at the center; thinking of freedom as something achieved instead of something granted. 

  • 6/18/2023

    What to the Incarcerated Is Juneteenth?

    by Antoine Davis and Darrell Jackson

    "We prisoners who are left to deteriorate inside one of America's most inhumane systems are able to find joy in celebrating Juneteenth, but not without indignities."

  • SOURCE: The Atlantic
    6/18/2021

    The Truth About Black Freedom

    by Daina Ramey Berry

    Observing Juneteenth shouldn't be limited to commemorating a grant of freedom by the government; the deeper history of emancipation is of Black Americans demanding and pursuing freedom for themselves. 

  • SOURCE: The New Republic
    6/14/2021

    How Deep Is America’s Reckoning with Racism? (Review Essay)

    by Kerri Greenidge

    "Juneteenth has gained recent popular attention after white Americans responded to last summer’s mass protest movement in the most American way possible—through token gestures of “historical reckoning” rather than actual atonement through, say, restoration of Section 4b of the 1965 Voting Rights Act."

  • SOURCE: Current Affairs
    6/19/2020

    Why Juneteenth Matters

    by Robert Greene II

    The contribution of Juneteenth by Black Texans to the broader Black American pantheon of celebrations and holidays should be cherished, just like that of the first Decoration Day held by Black South Carolinians in 1865.

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    6/18/2020

    Ida, Maya, Rosa, Harriet: The Power in Our Names

    by Martha S. Jones

    Among black women, names passed down represent the preservation of the memory and history of struggles for freedom. The author's name reflects those struggles at the intimate scale of family.

  • SOURCE: The New Yorker
    6/19/2020

    Growing Up with Juneteenth

    by Annette Gordon-Reed

    "I... did not know, as a child, how intensely African-Americans had fought to keep alive the memory of Juneteenth—to commemorate our ancestors’ struggles and their hopes, and to link them to our own."

  • SOURCE: Cabrini University
    6/19/2020

    Pacing the Struggle for Black Equality

    by Darryl C. Mace and Joseph R. Fitzgerald

    Black people continue to remind this nation that unless they are free, no one is free. Black liberation cannot be denied.

  • SOURCE: CNN
    6/13/2020

    Make Juneteenth a National Holiday Now

    by Peniel Joseph

    Making a national holiday to honor the emancipation of enslaved people would help fulfill a "generational opportunity" to finally build the Beloved Community Martin Luther King Jr.  sought in his own lifetime.

  • SOURCE: AP
    6/19/19

    GU272 Memory Project Launches on Juneteenth

    In addition to documents, photographs and the indexed genealogies of thousands of descendants, the project includes recorded interviews with dozens of living descendants.