How Juneteenth can help spur a more just society
Today’s holiday is a reminder of our nation’s troubling racial history — and is also a catalyst for a better future
By Shakti Belway, Executive Director of the National Center for Youth Law
Juneteenth, a now-federal holiday that commemorates the end of legal slavery in the U.S., for more than a century has served as a stark reminder of our nation’s cruel history.
With so many vestiges of that past still very much alive — continuing to create injustice and cause intergenerational pain and trauma — Juneteenth is an annual occasion not just for reflection, but also a catalyst to create a better, more just future.
The late civil rights icon Coretta Scott King once said: “Freedom is never really won; you earn it and win it every generation.”
To build the just, equitable society that children and youth deserve to inherit, we must first address and reform the systems and structures that continue to perpetuate the same harms that plagued our society in the decades before and after the original Juneteenth 159 years ago and continue today.
Ready for a rebuild
Juneteenth, the term and celebration, is derived from June 19, 1865. Although this date is more than two years after President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, and months after the official end of the Civil War, some people intentionally hid news about the Emancipation Proclamation by design to perpetuate slavery and deny enslaved people their rights. It was not until June 19, 1865 that the Emancipation Proclamation was enforced in Texas, thus formally freeing enslaved Black people in what had been the Confederacy.
Although the liberty due enslaved people was, once again, unjustly denied and then delayed, the Juneteenth milestone was significant. People of African descent who had been sold into slavery were forcibly brought to present-day Virginia in 1619, the immoral beginning of slavery. The practice of enslaving humans on these lands endured for 246 years, approximately, during which enslaved people were, de jure and de facto, denied human dignity, basic rights and forced to endure horrific untold abuse and trauma.
While Juneteenth, which was celebrated mostly among Black Americans in its early decades, represented progress, it was not swift. Legalized slavery was replaced in far too many ways and places by legal inequality, institutional inequity and pervasive societal and economic injustice, supported by racism and Jim Crow laws and policies that maintained racial segregation and discrimination.
Many of these policies and the legacy thereof still hurt Black people today, and they continue to have devastating impacts — even among our nation’s youngest members.
In public schools, Black students routinely face discriminatory disciplinary practices, like being referred to police or ticketed while in school at much higher rates than their white peers. Black youth and families continue to bear the brunt of injustice within the legal system, including being subject to increased surveillance, arrests, and an outsized share of discriminatory court fees and fines, penalties that often carry lifelong consequences.
Black youth even face inequities in trying to access health care.
These discriminatory laws, policies and practices, including laws that have had the effect of taking land away from and displacing Black owners and thereby preventing wealth accumulation among Black families, all work to propagate and maintain their experiences of intergenerational pain, trauma and poverty. And, they lock us all in a tragic cycle of cruelty and inhumanity for which our society, nation and governments bear collective responsibility.
If we are to course correct and promote equity and justice for all, we must rebuild these systems, tackling the bias so deeply ingrained within them and repairing them to break the cycle of injustice. We must stop placing blame on individuals or groups that are targeted and victimized by these systems and instead rectify the systems creating the problems.
Opal Lee, considered the “grandmother of Juneteenth,” was just 12 years old when, on Juneteenth in 1939, a violent white mob burned down her family’s home in Fort Worth, Texas.
Lee, now 97, has remained a lifelong social justice activist ever since. This month, she intends to move into a newly built home on the same property — bringing some closure to what had been a traumatic “what if” for the past 85 years.
This Junteenth, Lee and her new home can serve as vital inspiration for all of us as we plot our path forward: A rebuild, even on the same foundation, can lead to incredible outcomes and go a long way toward righting historical wrongs.
Shakti Belway is Executive Director of the National Center for Youth Law, a nonprofit organization that for more than 50 years has advocated on behalf of children, youth, families and communities. During her career, Shakti has worked in human rights advocacy, as a civil rights attorney, policy reformer and litigator, as an educator, and as a child and youth advocate.
