Juneteenth: The Freedom We Knew, the Truth They Couldn't Handle

BLK ALERTS - Juneteenth Marks A Freedom That Arrived Late And Remains Incomplete

Source: Myung J. Chun / Getty Juneteenth asks something more of us than a barbecue and a day off work. It asks us to hold the arrival of freedom in 1865 alongside the long and unfinished record of people who have spent the years since defending it, a fight that still has no finish line. By the time Congressman John Lewis died in 2020, he had spent more than half a century fighting for the liberation of Black Americans. It was a fight that took h…

Juneteenth: The Freedom We Knew, the Truth They Couldn't Handle

There is a myth we tell ourselves about Juneteenth, as if freedom arrived suddenly, like a thunderclap, on June 19, 1865, with General Granger reading General Order No. 3 to the enslaved people in Galveston, Texas. The story goes that they didn’t know. That Freedom’s song took two and a half years to travel from Abraham Lincoln’s pen to the cotton fields. That somehow, the Emancipation Proclamation was stuck in a bottle drifting along the Gulf. …