Six Essential Reads to Understand Juneteenth
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On June 19, 1865, two years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, word reached Texas notifying enslaved people of their freedom. Juneteenth is a holiday honoring this delayed freedom. But it’s not solely a day of celebration: Juneteenth also inspires reflection on all the work left to do to ensure the fullness of Black Americans’ liberty.
Despite a host of regional and statewide celebrations over the past century and a half, Juneteenth became recognized as a federal holiday only in 2021, when President Joe Biden signed a bill to that effect—likely as a response to George Floyd’s murder and the ensuing wave of organizing in 2020.
This year, I invite you to read six beautiful pieces of writing that offer a window into the state of Black America. In each of these stories, I am reminded of the fortitude of my enslaved ancestors, and of Black Americans’ resistance to oppression at every point in this country’s history.
Today we remember those who fought for their freedom, and we reflect on ensuring that dream is fully realized. “Memory is the purpose of Juneteenth,” my colleague Vann R. Newkirk II wrote in 2019. “On Juneteenth, it seizes the narrative, reminding the country of its original debt, and the debts it has since accrued.”
Your Reading List
By Daina Ramey Berry
Juneteenth is a celebration of just one way that Black people either created freedom or found it, often on their own terms. What we acknowledge this Juneteenth must be about more than what was given. It must be about what had already been claimed. Enslaved people were always the first givers of their own liberty. They did not wait idly for proclamations and decrees. They stole fragments of liberty and created spaces of freedom within the institution of slavery, even before they were ever legally ‘free.’ They put down their rakes and hoes and rested on beds of hay; they stole afternoon naps while hanging tobacco; they held nighttime parties to dance away their pain, and they held prayer meetings in the woods to nourish their spirits with hope.
Black Joy—Not Corporate Acknowledgment—Is the Heart of Juneteenth
By Kellie Carter Jackson
Though holidays, symbols, statues, and flags matter, it will take more than increased recognition of Juneteenth to combat racism. If not followed with substantive change, the relatively recent scramble to acknowledge Juneteenth will just feel like virtue signaling, acts of solidarity that ring hollow.
Stories of Slavery, From Those Who Survived It
By Clint Smith
From 1936 to 1938, interviewers from the [Federal Writers’ Project] gathered the firsthand accounts of more than 2,300 formerly enslaved people in at least 17 states. … While many of these narratives vividly portray the horror of slavery—of families separated, of backs beaten, of bones crushed—embedded within them are stories of enslaved people dancing together on Saturday evenings as respite from their work; of people falling in love, creating pockets of time to see each other when the threat of violence momentarily ceased; of children skipping rocks in a creek or playing hide-and-seek amid towering oak trees, finding moments when the movement of their bodies was not governed by anything other than their own sense of wonder. These small moments—the sort that freedom allows us to take for granted—have stayed with me.
By Ta-Nehisi Coates
Having been enslaved for 250 years, black people were not left to their own devices. They were terrorized. In the Deep South, a second slavery ruled. In the North, legislatures, mayors, civic associations, banks, and citizens all colluded to pin black people into ghettos, where they were overcrowded, overcharged, and undereducated. Businesses discriminated against them, awarding them the worst jobs and the worst wages. Police brutalized them in the streets. And the notion that black lives, black bodies, and black wealth were rightful targets remained deeply rooted in the broader society. Now we have half-stepped away from our long centuries of despoilment, promising, ‘Never again.’ But still we are haunted.
Balancing the Ledger on Juneteenth
By Vann R. Newkirk II
The idea of reparations is somehow both avant-garde and extraordinarily old. Its reemergence stems from a broad reassessment of the trajectory of black America’s material conditions, and a realization that even with the extraordinary efforts of individual black people and some political and economic protections, true equality always appears just out of reach.
“Considering Roe V. Wade, Letters to the Black Body”: A poem by Tiana Clark
Dear Highest Price, Dear Bear the Brunt & Double
Blow, Dear HeLa Cells Still Doubling, Dear
Disproportionately Impacted. Dear Anarcha
Without Anesthesia During Surgery with Sims.
Dear Fannie and the Mississippi Appendectomies
with the Sick and Tired Ceaseless Sonnet Crown.
Dear Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis. Dear Black
American Women Are 3 to 4 Times More Likely to Die
in Childbirth Than White Women. To all the Black Babies
sliced from lynched women’s bellies spilling black
For further reading, spend time with this collection of coverage on race and racism throughout the history of The Atlantic, compiled by Gillian White in 2020.
P.S.
I’ll leave you with a poem by Robert Hayden, the first Black American to be appointed as a consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress, about Frederick Douglass and his legacy.
“When it is finally ours, this freedom … needful to man as air,” he writes, the memory of Douglass will be honored “not with legends and poems” but “with the lives grown out of his life.” (You can also listen to an audio version of the poem if you prefer.)
— Amina