Juneteenth Is Independence Day
The real revolutionaries, the real revolution, and what we can learn from them
As a child, I thought I hated history. This, in spite of the fact that I could often be found sitting beside my grandparents, listening to them tell stories.
I did this with my Black grandfather, “Papa”, a reverend who told Brer Rabbit stories that captivated my cousins and me when we were small.
I did this with my Black grandmother, who loved to tell stories about family drama and give me the intimate details of our friends and family members. Calling me “Sunshine” and bidding me to give her “brown sugar” as she fast talked, and eye rolled, and sighed in excited exasperation.
I did this with my white grandmother, who herself wanted to be a writer, and would send me short stories of her childhood via dial-up internet. Would bake cookies and tell me about my father as a child as I leaned against her counter, stealing globs of raw dough.
I did this with my white grandfather, who loved to tell us about our family ancestry, one cigarette after another in hand, on the leather couch in his basement, a slideshow on the screen in front of us, spouting off the members of our family tree the same way long lineages are listed in the Bible. Nels beget Nels beget Nels beget Nels. (It’s a Bible kid joke. It’s a Scandinavian joke.)
As I grew older, I more formally interviewed my grandparents and my partner’s grandparents, too. My grandparents told me about their experience with the National Guard coming into their small rural community to enforce segregation. His grandparents told me stories of their time in the tent cities during the Dust Bowl. And, I couldn’t believe that people who’d experienced something I’d read about in history books, something I’d seen in black and white pictures, and wondered “what would it even be like?” were sitting right in front of me, able to tell me just that in their own words.
At the time, I still didn’t connect the dots that I loved history. That I was, as the West African tradition calls us, a griot.
But I have since come to realize I love history. The listening to and learning it, the retelling of it, the rituals that allow us to accept and heal and celebrate and connect with it and with our ancestors who lived it and who now live inside of us.
I have since come to understand that this is why I am drawn to rituals of all kinds, like (dare I say it) the church I am recovering from, which at its best gives us moments to reflect and to offer up our gratitude, and to hold each other in our hearts, and to light candles, and to sing songs, and to confront and invite the spirits of our past to join us in imagining.
Growing up, I always hated the 4th of July. And I hated learning about anything and everything to do with the Revolutionary War. I could not at that time articulate why. I’d love to tell you it’s because I understood that the holiday wasn’t for me and that it wasn’t for most of us. But that wasn’t it.
I just found it really fucking boring.
But, when I started to learn about Reconstruction in my 20s, really learn about all that had been left out of the stories I’d been told in my history classes about that era, I understood what was missing from the story of the fight for independence I’d been taught, and it’s this:
We define freedom. We create the conditions where it can thrive. And it must include all of us or none of us.
Which is why I will be celebrating today. Celebrating those who fought to create those conditions.
Celebrating the over 200,000 Black people, many of them formerly enslaved people who escaped the labor and death camps of the American plantation, who fought for their and their families’ freedom.
Celebrating the many who escaped slavery, then returned to bring others with them, to help others find safe passage along the treacherous journey.
Celebrating the countless freedom settlements and colonies throughout the U.S. where freed Black people built communities where they didn’t just find freedom for themselves, they created known refuges to hide and harbor others, too.
Celebrating the hundreds of Maroon communities that cultivated the marshlands of the deep South, making a way out of no way, and thriving in the harshest of conditions.
Celebrating the 40,000 formerly enslaved people who took their 40 acres and a mule and turned that paltry compensation for their generations of stolen lives and labor into thriving communities.
Celebrating the 40,000 people who fled the U.S. for Canada to live freer lives. Celebrating the tens of thousands more who fled the U.S. for Mexico.
Celebrating the more than 1,500 Black leaders who served in public office in the United States following the Civil War and ushered in some of the most progressive legislation our country has ever seen, including universal public education.
Celebrating the six million Black people who fled the Jim Crow South during the Great Migration and built vibrant, thriving communities all over the U.S.
Celebrating the civil rights leaders who marched on Washington, who rode on bombed buses, who boycotted, who faced beatings and brutality to gain their rights and ours.
Celebrating these demands for freedom, though many resulted in death and suffering, and what they teach us about our path forward.
Celebrating that 161 years ago today, on June 19, 1865, “colored troops” arrived in Galveston to tell their people they were free.
The truth is: Every single minute of freedom you enjoy today was hard-won by Black freedom fighters. Every right Black folks secured for themselves, they also secured for everyone else. Every attempt to take freedom from Black people now will be used to take freedom from us all.
Celebrating that my ancestors have taught me that, “until all of us are free, none of us is free.”
Celebrating Juneteenth, the one and only holiday that celebrates any real semblance of independence in the United States of America and I hope you celebrate — then fight for real, lasting, all-encompassing, expansive, and imaginative freedom like they did — too.
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Every week I share personal reflections, takes on pop culture and current events, and deep dives into U.S. history.
I’ve got four teens, some animals, live in the woods and have a demanding (but fulfilling!) job. And you’ve got well… *gestures at your equally full and hectic and wild and precious life.*
So, I know it isn’t a small ask to ask you to join me here. Still, I’m humbly asking that you do.
NGL, you will be pushed… but never punished. This is a space for learning out loud. For taking steps toward change in your personal and communal life that matter. Because when you know better you do actually have to do better.
But you can do this. We must, together. LFG.
With love — always,
Thank you - this was such an inspiring and powerful read.