The National Museum of African American History and Culture (the “Blacksonian”) on the history of Juneteenth: https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/historical-legacy-juneteenth

The Grio on the difference a year makes in the White House acknowledgement / celebration of Juneteenth: https://thegrio.com/2025/06/18/juneteenth-trump-white-house-what-a-difference-a-year-makes/

The Juneteenth 2025 Google Doodle and related thoughts: https://doodles.google/doodle/juneteenth-2025/

There are a lot of things out there to read about the historical and political significance of Juneteenth, and I encourage you to read a thing or two if you can. I’ve been reading a lot of the discussion about the holiday here and elsewhere, and decided to write about my own relationship with this day:

Growing up I never quite remembered the exact date of Juneteenth. My family wasn’t particularly political, and it didn’t really occur to me that the holiday was something that might be construed in a political or revolutionary way. Instead- it just was. As in, just as we celebrated Christmas, went to church on Easter, waited for the end of the school year, and had fun at church picnics once the weather got nice, running past dozing old deacons and tutting church ladies, Juneteenth always came around.

In Denver where I grew up, Juneteenth celebrations were always down in Five Points, a historically Black neighborhood. We were often there to take my grandmas to a soul food dinner on Sunday or to go to the Black American West Museum. But in June, there would be one weekend where my dad would say, nonchalantly, ‘Juneteenth this weekend, we goin’ tomorrow.’ It was like a lovely surprise every year. My mom spent hours doing our hair, and making sure my sister and I matched perfectly, our cornrows neat, our short sets clean and new.

Juneteenth was a weekend street festival that stretched for a few blocks but seemed like an entire world. It smelled like barbequed meat and incense and sweat. It was green and red and black and yellow. Sometimes there were baseball hats adorned with a simple ‘X’ for Malcom X. People wore dashikis and leather medallions with the outline of the African continent on them. It sounded like Bob Marley and Curtis Mayfield and George Clinton and Chaka Khan. Men played dominoes at card tables. Women fussed over the potato salad they were selling. Kids danced and played. My senses were always overwhelmed by Juneteenth in the best way, even as my dad muttered about the heat and my sandals started to stick to my tired feet. I walked around with a yummy, grilled, buttered corn on the cob on a stick to eat. Everything about Juneteenth was Black, and I didn’t notice it the same way a fish doesn’t notice the water. It didn’t occur to me to tell the few non-Black people I knew about Juneteenth, and if I had I don’t know what I would’ve said. There would be no way to articulate what we were being fed, as Black people, on that day, except to say that it was joyful, and proud, and essential. And we needed that sustenance in a world that rarely fed us in this way.

As I got to high school, reading the Autobiography of Malcolm X, reading Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, listening to Public Enemy, Juneteenth became a confirmation of my identity as a Black American, and an assertion of my right to be and to live in a country that seemed to both underestimate and fear us. It was my connection to my community, to the Black experience in America, and to the ancestors who endured what we could only imagine.

And now, seeing Juneteenth become a federal holiday, I admit that my feelings are complicated. It had always felt to me not like a secret, but like an occasion that was by and for and about Black people. This wasn’t exclusion, but instead reification-a chance to renew the hope and tenacity that we need as Black people in America, lest we drown in justifiable rage. And it should, in all facets, be centered around how Black people want this holiday to look, and what they want it to be, and even though I hope this will be the case the majority of the time, I look back at the way contributions of Black people to American life and art and culture have been assimilated in this country and I cannot help but be cautious.

For me, Juneteenth is about hope in the face of dire odds. It’s about pride in heritage and acknowledging those who came before us who did the work, who carried that weight, and who worked for a better day not for themselves, but for the benefit unknown future generations. Juneteenth is about honoring innumerable contributions to American society made by Black people, many of whom were never acknowledged or given their due in their lifetimes. And Juneteenth is about America in all its messy contradictions, its bloody history, and its incredible complexity.