Juneteenth has always been personal

Growing up, I collected Old Navy’s American Flag tees every year. 

It wasn’t officially summer until I had my red, white, and blue tank top in hand, and I was seated at a Fourth of July parade with my parents and younger sister. But throughout the years, my affinity for the stars and stripes and the patriotic holiday waned.

Thanks to the Biden administration, Juneteenth is an official part of everyone’s summer now, and a newly important occasion for me, now that I’m a parent myself.

Also known as Jubilee Day, Freedom Day, Black Independence Day, and Emancipation Day in Texas, Juneteenth is a portmanteau of the words “June” and “nineteenth” to recall the day in 1865 that roughly 250,000 enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, were informed of their freedom. It was too little, too late, and more than two years after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation declaring that “all persons held as slaves … shall be free.” 

It was also, as recent testimonies remind us, a messy business.

I’m ashamed to admit that I didn’t know about Juneteenth until well into adulthood, though my sister, who attended an HBCU, heard the call much earlier.

Though Black Americans have been commemorating the day since 1866 — first in church communities in Texas, then across the South and in cities associated with the Great Migration — it didn’t become a federal holiday until 2021, following the so-called “racial reckoning” in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder in 2020. The designation has inspired a new generation of celebrants to mark the moment. 

As someone still creating Juneteenth traditions, I’m happy for the company. And, I’ve learned a few things.

[insert Juneteenth 2020, Port of Oakland, California. Photo Credit: Peg Hunter]

In the summer of 2020, I wrote a letter to the leadership team at the education nonprofit where I worked at the time, insisting that we — an organization dedicated to diversity, equity, and inclusion long before it became a trending topic — should have the day off. I was inspired by this Instagram post from The Creative Collective NYC.

[insert Juneteenth post]

I took my own advice (and the day off) to celebrate my first Juneteenth. It felt personal.

Instead of a red, white, and blue shirt from a big-box store, I bought a yellow Juneteenth-inspired crop top from a Black woman-owned business. My husband and I drove to a nearby park and enjoyed a nice picnic along with about a half dozen other Black residents who’d decided to celebrate the day with cookouts galore. 

Four years later, Juneteenth still feels personal. 

It’s about family and food, and the hope we have. It’s about statement tees declaring Black Lives Matter, Black Girl Magic, Happy Juneteenth, and so forth and so on.

Even the colors tell a story.

Juneteenth is awash in the color red, which was associated with the Yoruba and Kongo peoples who were forced here during the later years of the Transatlantic slave trade. “They placed great philosophical and spiritual value in the color red as it symbolizes sacrifice, transition, and power,” explains the National Museum of African American History & Culture.

Now, the color lives on in the Juneteenth foods we enjoy — barbecue, red velvet cake, red beans and rice. For me, most especially, it’s the strawberry soda (I’m originally from the East Coast and refuse to call it pop) from Hecky’s Barbecue, a Black-owned family business in Evanston, Illinois. The founder, Hecky Powell, developed the now iconic drink as an ode to his paternal great grandfather who was born into slavery in Missouri. 

See? It’s personal.

My husband and I recently walked in our first Juneteenth parade — Evanston’s fifth annual parade — with our two-year-old daughter, joining legions of celebrations across the country. (This year, I wore my Well-Read Black Girl shirt because we were walking with our local library.)

There were students from Evanston Township High School marching with red, black, and green balloons, and families of all races lining the parade route waving, smiling, and wishing us a happy day. There were floats, marching bands, dancers, and cheerleaders, whom we saw practicing to Beyoncé songs as we were lining up. At the end of the route was the Juneteenth festival at Ingraham Park, which included music, vendors, poets, and, of course, food.

But even this feels hard-won. 

Because of racism, segregation, and resistance to Black advancement, many Black Americans were not allowed to celebrate Juneteenth on public land, which led some Black communities in Texas to purchase land specifically for the occasion.

[insert picture of Group on Emancipation Day, circa 1880s, in Houston’s Emancipation Park. Reverend Jack Yates, who led the community purchase of the Park in 1872, is pictured on the far left, and his daughter Sallie Yates dressed in black in the center Source: Houston Public Library Digital Archives]

According to The Public Domain Review, “the first such communally-bought land was Houston’s Emancipation Park, a ten-acre lot purchased in 1872 by the Colored People’s Festival and Emancipation Park Association led by the Baptist minister and formerly enslaved Jack Yates.”

I imagine those earlier Juneteenth celebrations, fraught as they must have been, to be similar to mine, with plenty of red foods and family, sharing the joyful and solemn stories of who we are. Because that is what Black people do. Commemorate a history that most people would like to forget is in our DNA. To paraphrase Hattie White, Jay Z’s grandmother whose voice is included on Beyoncé’s song “Freedom,” “we were served lemons, but we made lemonade.”

[insert picture of Martha Yates Jones (left) and Pinkie Yates (right), daughters of Rev. Jack Yates, in a decorated carriage parked in front of the Antioch Baptist Church located in Houston’s Fourth Ward, 1908. Source: Houston Public Library Digital Archives]

Last year, I learned about the history of Juneteenth carriages from my friend and floral artist John Caleb Pendleton of Planks & Pistils in Chicago. In a now iconic Juneteenth floral installation, Pendleton paid homage to the decorated horse-drawn Juneteenth carriages that early celebrants used by adorning a 1976 Cadillac Eldorado with a mix of domestic flowers, such as roses and baby’s breath, and tropical ones, such as birds of paradise, flowering ginger, and protea.

[insert picture of Pendleton’s Cadillac installation. Source: Photo credit: Khalid Ibrahim, @eatpomegranate]

Pendleton is one of many artists who are giving new life to Juneteenth by offering us a model for community and contemplation. By participating in these new traditions as a family, my hope and prayer is that our daughter will grow up more educated about her lineage than I was and also proud of it as well — because while slavery is part of our history, it is not our full story. 

[insert picture of Juneteenth celebration and march through Uptown Greenville, June 19, 2021. Source: City of Greenville, North Carolina]

And Lord knows that I’ll do my best to ensure our daughter is exposed to the richness, the fullness, and the joy of our culture.

The Creative Collective Instagram post that inspired my early workplace advocacy around the holiday also said, “Juneteenth asks us to consider the promises of freedom not yet fully realized in the United States. The holiday represents the ways in which freedom for Black people has been delayed by the ongoing institutional and systemic oppression of Black people in America.”

[insert photograph of the view of a Buffalo Soldiers representation at the Juneteenth Parade in East Austin. Source: Austin History Center, Austin Public Library]

We’re still fighting for that freedom in the form of racial equity in healthcare, education, employment, and homeownership, issues that continue to impact the wealth and happiness of real people across the country. As a first-time mom, I spend a lot of time thinking about the Black maternal mortality rate (which is three times higher than the rate for white women in the U.S.) as a way to frame how far we have to go.

So now that the holiday is on everyone’s calendar — and brand agenda, lest we forget Walmart’s Juneteenth ice cream — this labor toward liberation should be on all Americans’ to-do list.

Because as Fannie Lou Hamer once said, “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.” And we’ve got a lot of work to do.

A version of this essay was originally published in the Equity Observer email newsletter. Catch up on past issues here. Sign up for insightful commentary, breaking news, and community shout-outs delivered twice weekly. Find your people.