Last year, President Biden declared Juneteenth a new Federal Holiday. Since it fell on a Saturday, the observance was scheduled for the Friday following the President’s declaration on Thursday. Unfortunately, I was already on a business trip to Washington, D.C., and it was too late to take advantage of the holiday.
This year is different, and I recognize that I know the basics of the day—it marked the date the last slaves were set free from Galveston, Texas—but little more. As a white guy, I don’t have to know that part of history. It’s part of my privilege to determine whether or not I want to learn more…and I do, so I started to dig deeper using a Google search, and I learned that slaves weren’t finally free until a full 2 years after the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 and 2 months after the end of the civil war!
Seeking to learn even more, I found the book On Juneteenth, written by Annette Gordon-Reed—a Harvard University Professor and Author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. Reed penned this book during the summer of 2020 when she was on lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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