Confessions: From unaware to informed about Juneteenth
Discovering the significance of America's second Independence Day
(If you’re new here: Please keep in mind that this is my personal blog, one that suffices as my social media—which I despise. I create what I create here mainly for me. Not for clicks or publicity or drama.)
I have three confessions to make regarding Juneteenth:
I had never heard of it until 2017 or 2018.
I didn’t know what it was or the significance of it until 2022.
(I’ll share the third confession later in this post.)
A couple of years ago, several friends reached out to ask me about Juneteenth, which, declared a federal holiday three years ago by Pres. Joe Biden, commemorates the day in 1865 when Union soldiers arrived in Galveston Bay to inform enslaved Blacksans of their freedom. This, yes, came two years after Pres. Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, which declared “that all persons held as slaves…in the rebelious states” were free.
“Candidly,” I said, “I only recently realized the significance of the date. Growing up in Mississippi, Juneteenth was never mentioned. Then, as an adult, it never came up in my reading, at least not noticeably so.”
But assumptions abound
However, I came to realize that many folks assumed I knew about Juneteenth because my daughter was an actress in the movie Miss Juneteenth, which debuted in 2020, the year before the federal designation. The movie, shot in its entirety in Fort Worth, surrounds a single mom and former teen beauty queen, who enters her daughter into the local Miss Juneteenth pageant. The drama that unfolds is both heartbreaking and heartwarming, the work of great storytelling and talented actresses, actors, and crew.
My daughter, who had only a small role in the movie, spent the summer of 2019 and early parts of 2020 filming. While the production, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, coincided with the 155th anniversary of Juneteenth, we had no idea of the name of the movie or any underlying meaning until it was released.
An awakening
Since the film was released during the COVID-19 shutdown, the first local showing was at the Coyote Drive-In theater in Fort Worth. I remember the sense of pride I felt at seeing my daughter on the big screen. She was radiant. In the days and weeks that followed, I would get emails from friends and acquaintances who saw the trailers and recognized my daughter.
It would be two years later, in 2022, however, before I started getting specific questions about Juneteenth. It was at this time that I started doing some research and my eyes were opened to the significance of the date. (I also realized I had heard of Juneteenth several years earlier but never investigated its meaning for myself.) It also made sense to me, then, that folks would assume—given that my daughter was in a movie titled Miss Juneteenth—I was more aware.
As apocryphal as that sounds, it’s a fact that I am not at all embarassed about.
In all honesty
My third confession will likely come as no surprise to anyone who knows me well: I don’t like to discuss race. I don’t mean it makes me uncomfortable; I mean it conjures in me images and feelings from my youth that are…not positive. Growing up in Mississippi, as I did, in the eighties and early 90s, I was far removed from the miasma of hate, prejudice, and discrimination seen decades earlier.
But the rural South was far from hospitable, especially for someone as inquisitive, well-read, and impatient as me. My way of dealing with it was to lean into the advice of my parents.
“Get an education,” which I internalized as “with an education, you can live wherever you want and not have to tolerate what you grew up seeing all around you.”
In college, I adopted six words as a tagline that would propel me into adulthood:
“Living well is the best revenge.”
Though I’ve adopted many other such taglines during various periods of my life, those six are ever-present.
What about Juneteenth?
One of the more curious aspects of being Black and conservative is that you’re always being mischaracterized or misunderstood, seemingly intentionally at times. For example, when I say I don’t celebrate Black history month, what some people hear is “He doesn’t celebrate the accomplishments of Black Americans.” No. You must listen to the entire sentence:
“I don’t celebrate Black history in isolation. Black history is a part of American history. There is no American history without Black history. We helped to build this great country. ”
So, while, yes, I’m all for celebrating the achievement of Black Americans individually, I also want Black Americans mentioned when we talk about all areas of progress, including science and technology, politics, business, agriculture, government, medicine, engineering, media, etc.
I’ve said and written before that my reverence for the U.S. is deep and lasting, in part because I don’t untangle our accomplishments from our shared suffering. There is no America with the struggle for the progress of Black America and the willingness of the country to wrestle with and vanquish its greatest birth defect, slavery.
“The U.S. story,” I said to a friend in 2022, “is one of overcoming and becoming.”
You can’t have the latter without the former.
How do I celebrate Juneteenth? The same way I celebrate MLK Jr. Day or any other for that matter: By being mindful of the nation’s progress, recognizing that there is much work to be done, but appreciating that the world I inhabit was made better by those who sacrificed before me and, just as important, my daughters’ world will be brighter by the work me, her mother and millions of others undertake each day.
A perfect ending
Condoleezza Rice, former Secretary of State and current director for Stanford’s Hoover Institution, shared a beautiful Juneteenth article today via The Free Press.
“To me, Juneteenth is a recognition of what I call America’s second founding. Despite our nation’s extraordinary founding documents about equality, this country was founded as a slave-owning state. That is our birth defect. But the words in those carefully crafted documents—written by great men who were themselves flawed human beings—ultimately lit the way toward a more perfect union. In some sense, the history of the United States is a story of striving to make their soaring words—We the People—real to every American. It’s the story of becoming what we profess to be.
“Today, just as I once did with my parents, I will celebrate Juneteenth. I will think about my ancestors and what they must have felt when they were liberated from slavery. And I will give thanks for being born in a country where such moral progress is possible. That is worth celebrating not just by black Americans but by all of us.”