Five years after Juneteenth became a federal holiday, the spirit of racial liberation that drove it has fizzled. Demands for racial justice are not as loud or widespread. The Trump administration has undermined the preservation of the history of slavery and the Supreme Court recently gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act meant to protect marginalized voters. Many companies, including Amazon and Target, have scaled back diversity, equity and inclusion efforts or eliminated them entirely.
“This has been one of the most let-down times for Black people in this country, with 60 to 70 years’ worth of progress being snatched away within five years,” said Coby Hayes, who will be a junior at Harvard University and is vice president of its Black Student Association. “While it’s a holiday and it’s a national holiday … it’s important that we don’t forget to truly honor Black people through legislation and true legal progress.”
Similarly frustrated are Stephanie Guirand and Bárbara ZO, core team members of The Black Response, a Cambridge-based anti-carceral organization. “The work isn’t sexy anymore,” ZO said. “It was, at a point and time, ‘the thing’… but it’s work that’s always been happening and it’s going to continue.”
They say Juneteenth’s federalization has caused it to be whitewashed and depoliticized. In particular, collaborations with police and the commercialization of the holiday — where Juneteenth-themed plates and napkins are sold in stores — disregards its history and decenters community.
“We cannot let the police lead a Juneteenth anything,” Guirand said. “This is about creating community… if we’re sitting together and we’re asserting and acknowledging each other’s humanity and daring to dream together and share our imaginations for a different future, I think that’s what I want people to do.”
Juneteenth observes the day in 1865 when Union soldiers informed enslaved people in Galveston, Texas that they were free — over two years after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. But it was only recently that it became a prominent date, at least nationally. Many members of Cambridge’s Black community anticipate the holiday’s commemoration and celebration of freedom, even if it was not a holiday they knew much about when they were younger.
Stephanie Crayton’s family on her father’s side were in Texas and celebrated Juneteenth, but she grew up in Massachusetts, and was left to ask why Juneteenth wasn’t something that was celebrated here. “I still didn’t really realize what it was until the last seven or eight years,” she said. It wasn’t until Crayton, then a Cambridge firefighter, started Paragon, the local African American firefighters society, that she realized the deep importance of Juneteenth and how few people knew about it.
Crayton volunteered with the Cambridge Juneteenth Committee to help organize the annual Juneteenth parade, which starts at Central Square and ends at Riverside Press Park. Lida Griffin, a chairperson of the committee, grew up in Atlanta and Boston and did not know the significance of Juneteenth until her mid-20s. As a darker-skinned person who experienced racism, Griffin said her family raised her to love herself and that part of loving herself is educating herself.
“I feel like the significance of Juneteenth now for me is educating everyone about their power and being proud of their empowerment,” Griffin said.
Both Crayton and Griffin emphasized that Juneteenth is a celebration and should be kept joyous. “Juneteenth is a reminder of what we’ve been through, but also, joy,” Griffin said. “While we’re in survival mode, still have joy.”
“You have to commit to happiness as well,” agreed ZO. “It’s really important for people to know their history and where they came from and how that plays into where they are right now… and making the conscious decision to also commit to taking care of yourself and other people in your community.”
Juneteenth a true symbol of freedom
Rev. Irene Monroe, a local public theologian, has celebrated Juneteenth for over four decades. She considers, Juneteenth more important than the Fourth of July because it symbolizes freedom and independence in a way that the Fourth does not. But in the last five years, she says not much has changed systemically. She said the swift adoption of racial justice policies and DEI programming was a “bone” thrown to appease protestors, not something intended to last permanently.
“The tentacles of discrimination, whether economic, educational, class, race or whatever, have just broadened,” she said. “Now, more people are talking about it because the class and the race of people who were supposed to have easy access – meaning White, educated people – no longer have access to the American dream any more than Black people.”
With the ongoing DEI and racial justice rollbacks, it’s a scary time for Hayes, but also one that offers potential. He wants people to support Black politicians, organizations, businesses and people to ensure the needs of the Black community – and all the marginalized communities in the nation – are brought to the forefront.
“The principles in which America was founded on and failed to deliver on – it’s now a time to show we want the true principles to apply for everyone in this country.”
History matters
Hayes said he knew about Juneteenth while growing up in Marion, Ark. but it wasn’t celebrated. However, his family were very familiar with the history of slavery because they lived it.
“A lot of us are the descendants of sharecroppers, the descendants of people who, outside the Emancipation Proclamation, still endured severe disenfranchisement and slavery through different means,” Hayes said. “That was always taught to me as a part of Black history.”
Local history also matters, said Crayton. Central Square, where the parade starts, is also where Patrick Raymond, the first Black fire chief in Cambridge and the nation, is said to have lived.
“Nobody in Cambridge really knows who he was or what he did and it’s an important part of our history and it’s right there in Cambridge,” Crayton said. “And I just think about how many people we don’t know about.”
For Janie Victoria Ward, a retired professor, there was a different holiday for Black people that mattered in her youth, although she couldn’t understand why her church in Cambridge would take her and her Sunday school peers all the way to Salem for a picnic every July. The adults around her simply said, “it’s what we do.” Later, she learned the “Black Picnic,” also known as “Negro Election Day,” is a tradition dating back to the 1700s, when enslaved Black people organized themselves into a democracy and elected people to lead their community.
“We may not have remembered what the event was, but as a people, we knew this was something we wanted to celebrate,” Ward said. She thinks the same can be true for Juneteenth. She is committed to passing the history of the Black Picnic and Juneteenth onto her children and grandchildren. “We have to hold onto those historical moments and pass them on to the next generation. Especially when it feels that the powers that be would be more than happy if everyone forgot about them.”
As the nation itself turns 250, Monroe says we have to remember Black people played a role during the Revolution. “We don’t even celebrate the Black patriots,” she said. “Crispus Attacks, this was a brother of African and Native American ancestry, right here in Framingham. He was the first person to die in the American Revolution. Prince Estabrook, he was a Black minuteman [in Lexington]. We don’t hear that.”
Ward said there are waves of disinformation and obfuscation when it comes to conversations on slavery, which makes educating people important. She wants people to recognize that Juneteenth is just one part of a greater catastrophic event and consider what it might’ve felt like for people to learn they were free.
“I think there are people outside the African American community that could learn a lot about who we are as a people by understanding that joy, by understanding where that exultation came from,” Ward said. “It helps them to understand what fuels our resistance. It helps them to understand why we continue to fight for everything that we believe we deserve.”
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