On Juneteenth, Black Women Reflect on Seeking Freedom Outside the U.S.

On Juneteenth, Black Women Reflect on Seeking Freedom Outside the U.S.

On June 19, 1865—the day we now commemorate as “Juneteenth”—the enslaved people of Galveston, Texas, learned they were free. The Emancipation Proclamation had been signed more than two years earlier. The news had simply not arrived until then. I think about that gap often. The distance between the announcement of freedom and the experience of it. The way something can be technically true and still take years, generations, to land in the body—if …