Today it is still celebrated within families, with gatherings and food, but it’s also celebrated on a larger scale in many cities with parades, freedom walks, and festivals, especially since it became a federal holiday last year. In 1872, a group of Black ministers and businessmen purchased 10 acres of land, which they turned into Emancipation Park, a place to hold Juneteenth celebrations.
Traditionally, the day was celebrated by praying and bringing families together. Juneteenth is also known as “Juneteenth Independence Day,” “Emancipation Day,” or “Freedom Day.” The holiday is the oldest national holiday commemorating the end of slavery. Communities nationwide are celebrating by walking 2.5 miles, in recognition of the 2.5 years it took for the news of freedom to reach all enslaved people in the United States. Opal Lee has been campaigning for decades to have Juneteenth nationally recognized, and when she was 94 years old, she saw President Biden sign the bill. On June 17th, 2021, it officially became a federal holiday. June 19th is the day that federal troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, in 1865 to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation that all enslaved people be freed. From growing up in a racially segregated town in Texas, where she was the first child to integrate the town’s all-white schools, to practicing law in New York City, which provided premium training for the historian’s craft, Gordon-Reed brings her own storied experiences in conversation with those of our country to illuminate our shared and complicated history.Juneteenth, short for June nineteenth, commemorates the effective end of slavery in the United States. Gordon-Reed’s refusal to accept simple, one-sided narratives in history has led her to reveal America’s most important untold stories through her work. Following its publication in 2021, this pivotal new text was named one of the ten best books of the year by The New York Times. Filled with even deeper, more personal recollections than her previous works, On Juneteenth is a captivating blend of American history, family chronicle, and memoir that explores the violence and oppression that preceded and followed the inaugural celebrations of the holiday, what it means to us now, and how it relates to our larger fight for equality.
Impassioned and moving, her latest bestselling book On Juneteenth sets out to capture the integral importance of the holiday to American history. The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family-which won the Pulitzer Prize in History, along with fourteen other awards-has been called “the best study of a slave family ever written” by noted Jefferson scholar Joseph Ellis. Annette Gordon-Reed, one of the foremost voices on race and history in America, is also an award-winning author of six books that provide rich examinations of American figures central to the country’s mythology.
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