This year, Juneteenth arrives at a moment of change in the United States. We celebrate, mourn, observe and learn.
This year, Juneteenth arrives at a moment of change in the United States. We celebrate, mourn, observe and learn.
How We Juneteenth
ByVeronica ChambersJune 18, 2020
Friday, June 19, 2020
Juneteenth
Is
In
TheClaiming
Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York signed an executive order on Wednesday making Juneteenth a holiday for state employees; the same goes for tech companies like Twitter, and even where I work, at The New York Times. This year,Juneteenth,a holiday that celebrates the arrival of the news of emancipation from slavery, seems to be a bigger deal across the nation.
But there’s a conversation I’ve been having with my friends: Is celebrating this holiday enough to begin to fix all that’s so very broken? And, one tick further, is the national embrace of what has been known as the African-American Independence Day a dangerous idea? Some people wonder — if we sip on ourtraditional red drinksas we socially distance on screens and porches — will we be lulled into feeling more free than we really are?
Saidiya Hartman, the author of “Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments” and a 2019 MacArthur “genius” grant winner whose work explores the “afterlife of slavery in modern American society,” said: “How to live a free life, how one can live, is the pressing question for black folks in the wake of slavery’s formal end.” Ms. Hartman said that imagining a freer life and a more just society has been the purpose of generations of black people since the days of Reconstruction.
“Recently, I heard Angela Davis talk about the radical imagination,” Ms. Hartman said. “And a fundamental requirement is believing that the world you want to come into existence can happen. I think that that is how black folks have engaged with and invested in and articulated freedom, as an ideal and as an everyday practice.”
I couldn’t agree more. As someone who has celebrated Juneteenth for a long time, I think we need it now — not in lieu of the freedom, justice and equality we are still fighting for — but in addition, because we have been fighting for so very long.
The elemental sermon embedded into the history and lore of Juneteenth has always been one of hope. The gifts of the holiday are the moments of connection, renewal and joy for a people who have had to endure so much, for so long.
To me, Juneteenth matters because it says: Keep going, the future you want is coming.— Veronica Chambers
“Words of Emancipation didn’t arrive until the middle of June so they called it Juneteenth.So that was it, the night of Juneteenth celebration, his mind went on.The celebration of a gaudy illusion.”— Ralph Ellison, “Juneteenth”
Is
a
Celebration
How We Juneteenth
Gina Cherelus
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Is
in
Our Names
Ida, Maya, Rosa, Harriet: The Power in Our Names
Martha S. Jones
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The Stuff of Astounding: A Poem for JuneteenthBy PATRICIA SMITH
Unless you spring from a history that is smug and reckless,unless
you’ve vowed yourself blind to a ceaseless light, you see us.We
are a shea-shined toddler writhing through Sunday sermon, weare
the grizzled elder gingerly unfolding his last body. And we areintent
and insistent upon the human in ourselves. We are the doctoron
another day at the edge of reason, coaxing a wrong hope,ripping
open a gasping body to find air. We are five men dripping fromthe
burly branches of young trees, which is to say that we dare aworld
that is both predictable and impossible. What else can we learnfrom
suicides of the cuffed, the soft targets black backs be? Stuck inits
rhythmic unreel, time keeps including us, even as our agedroot
is doggedly plucked and trampled, cursed by ham-fisted spittersin
the throes of a particular fever. See how we push on as enigma,the
free out loud, the audaciously unleashed, how slyly we scan thesky—
all that wet voltage and scatters of furious star—to realize thatwe
are the recipients of an ancient grace. No, we didn’tbegintolive
when, on the 19th June day of that awkward, ordinary spring—with
no joy, in a monotone still flecked with deceit—Seems you andthese
others are free.That moment did not begin our breath. Ourtruths—
the ones we’d been birthed with—had already met reckoning inthe
fields as we muttered tangled nouns of home. We reveled inblack
from there to now, our rampant hue and nap, the unbridledbreath
that resides in the rafters, from then to here, everything we areis
the stuff of astounding. We are a mother who hums snippets ofgospel
into the silk curls of her newborn, we are the harried sister onthe
elevator to the weekly paycheck mama dreamed for her. We areblack
in every way there is—perm and kink, upstart and elder, widevoice,
fervent whisper. We heft our clumsy homemade placards, wewill
curl small in the gloom weeping to old blues ballads. We swearnot
to be anybody else’s idea of free, lining up precisely, waiting tobe
freed again and again. We are breach and bellow, resisting asilent
consent as we claim our much of America, its burden and snarl,the
stink and hallelujah of it, its sicknesses and safe words, all itsblack
and otherwise. Only those feigning blindness fail to see thebody
of work we are, and the work of body we have done. Everythingis
what it is because of us. It is misunderstanding to believe thatfree
fell upon us like a blessing, that it was granted by a signatureand
an abruptly opened door. Listen to the thousand ways to sayblack
out loud. Hear a whole people celebrate their free and fragilelives,
then find your own place inside that song. Make the singingmatter.
Is a Gift
How The Women of the Jemima Code Freed Me
Toni Tipton-Martin
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Is
Still
Overdue
How Reparations for Slavery Became a 2020 Campaign Issue
Emma Goldberg
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“Like a lot of Black women, I have always had to invent the power my freedom requires.”— June Jordan, from “On Call”
“All you need in the world is love and laughter. That’s all anybody needs. To have love in one hand and laughter in the other.”— August Wilson, “Joe Turner's Come and Gone”
“The function of freedom is to free someone else.”— Toni Morrison, commencement address at Barnard College
“The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.”— James Baldwin, “Nobody Knows My Name”
Is Education
‘Dear White Women’: The Public Classroom of Rachel Cargle
Siraad Dirshe
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Is
Self-Care
Rest as Reparations
Sandra E. Garcia
Read Story
A project byVeronica Chambers,withTracy Ma, Joanna Nikas, Choire Sichaand friends.Photo editing byBeth Bristow, Anika Burgess, Nakyung Han, Eve Lyons, JuliAnna PatinoandJames Pomerantz