I was a student at Southern University, a historically Black university, when I learned the truth about Juneteenth and its correlation with our freedom. I may have heard of Juneteenth before then, but I couldn't have told you that it fell on June 19 or that it celebrated the day after the Civil War when enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, learned they were free. I learned the truth because of the Afrocentric brothers and sisters on campus who more or less demanded that their schoolmates "do the knowledge" about our history. Though I grew up less than 300 miles east of Galveston in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Juneteenth was never mentioned in any of my K-12 social studies or history lessons.
We all know about Juneteenth now. In 2021, after years of tireless advocacy by Opal Lee, then a 94-year-old Black retired schoolteacher who had previously walked 1,400 miles from Texas to Washington, D.C., to demand a federal holiday, President Joe Biden signed the bill establishing that federal holiday into law. So why, just four short years after the recognition of a holiday commemorating freedom, does it feel like Black people are less free? This is a preview of Donney Rose's latest column. Read the full column here. |
