In June 2021, President Joseph Biden signed into law the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act, making Juneteenth a federal holiday. Celebrated on June 19th, Juneteenth marks the symbolic end of slavery in the United States, an institution that, from its beginnings in seventeenth-century Virginia, destroyed the bodies, families, lives, and dreams of over ten million people of African descent over the span of three centuries.

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder in May 2020, I received many requests to speak on Juneteenth. Prior to that year, despite being a historian of African American and U.S. history for almost two decades at that point, I had never—never—been asked to present or teach about Juneteenth as a holiday or its historical significance. Since 2020, I’ve given numerous talks in academic settings, to community organizations and corporations, in classrooms, and to government entities. I especially appreciate discussing Juneteenth in non-academic settings, because these conversations typically engage “real-world” (as opposed to purely scholarly) concerns. What is the history of Juneteenth up to this moment? What might its future be?

I find it troubling that it seemingly took the so-called “racial reckoning” inspired by Floyd’s murder to generate widespread interest in Juneteenth beyond Black communities. After all, Black Americans and their allies had been fighting for decades upon decades for national recognition of this holiday and its history — Opal Lee being chief among them. Still, I take every opportunity to speak about Juneteenth and its deeper meanings within U.S. history. In addition to honoring the enslaved people at the heart of this particular history and celebrating their emancipation*, recognition of Juneteenth holds both practical and psychical value for us in the here and now: its history highlights and requires that we wrestle with the systemic racism that accounts for the precarious nature of Black freedom, citizenship, rights, and equality since this nation’s founding.

For the past five years, I’ve had the honor of providing opening remarks for my town’s annual reading of Frederick Douglass’s “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”, which he delivered to the Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society in Rochester, New York, in 1852. Recognizing that many people are occupied on the Fourth of July, the organizers of this event—the Natick Historical Society—hold the reading on Juneteenth. As a commemoration of slavery’s end, Juneteenth is both a day of celebration and, perhaps more importantly, a day of contemplation about Black freedom. And there is perhaps no more powerful reflection on the meaning of Black freedom in American oratory and literature than Douglass’s famous speech.

If you are looking for someone to speak on Juneteenth’s significance as a history and holiday, please reach out.

*It is always important to distinguish emancipation from freedom.