Celebrate Freedom
If America has a brand, it’s “freedom.” We hate being told what to do. We thrive on doing our own thing, our own way. Every summer, we celebrate our hard-earned right to be independent and make our own life decisions – a right that many of our citizens have suffered or even died to earn and preserve.
If you think we’re talking about Independence Day, you’re jumping ahead. This weekend, join us in celebrating Juneteenth, a holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States.
“Juneteenth” is a merged version of “June Nineteenth,” the day in 1865 when the last enslaved persons in Texas finally learned that they had technically been freed two years earlier in the Emancipation Proclamation. Ever since, June 19th has been a day of celebration across the U.S., particularly in African American communities. Last year, Juneteenth was proclaimed a federal holiday.
Holidays are more meaningful when we understand more deeply the reasons why we celebrate them. To learn more about this holiday, go to the library catalog at RVL.info and search for “Juneteenth” to find books, audiobooks and movies for children and adults. Grab some titles before the public library closes for the holiday weekend (Saturday-Monday)!
Now, 1865 was a long time ago. We can’t chat in-person with someone who lived through the final emancipation that year. But we can hear their voices through the books they have written. Here are some first-hand accounts from formerly-enslaved African-Americans:
- “Twelve Years a Slave” by Solomon Northup (also a movie)
- “The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass” by (you guessed it) Frederick Douglass
- “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” by Harriet Jacobs
- “Up From Slavery” by Booker T. Washington (bonus: visit Washington’s birthplace in nearby Hardy, VA)
Of course, most African-Americans had no opportunities to write books about their experiences, and the few who did often watered down the more graphic aspects of their experiences for their Victorian audience. So how do we know what the African-American experience was really like pre-and post-emancipation? Try some of these engaging titles:
- “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration” by Isabel Wilkerson
- “Roots: The Saga of an American Family” by Alex Haley (also a movie)
- “Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019” edited by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain
- “On Juneteenth” by Annette Gordon-Reed
In addition to being a festive celebration of freedom, Juneteenth is a sobering reminder that we independence-lovers are all too quick to deny freedom to other people who look, think, act, or experience the world differently than we do. In doing so, we also hurt ourselves. Freedom is not a “won-and-done” deal. It’s a daily struggle against our own tendencies and blind spots. As the Greek philosopher Epictetus, himself a former enslaved person, noted: “No man is free who is not master of himself.”
Happy Juneteenth!