Juneteenth
Celebrating our new American holiday by pushing its overlooked history into the light
Hannah Drake and Kwame Scruggs each founded and lead award-winning Black history projects to celebrate the resilience and spirit of America’s new national holiday
NEW YORK — Happy Juneteenth!
To those not yet familiar, Juneteenth— a portmanteau of the words “June” and “nineteenth” —is our newest federal holiday in the United States, observed annually on June 19th for the past three years—and again today—to commemorate the end of slavery in the United States.
It’s also a holiday meant to celebrate Black resilience and achievement, and to recommit our nation to honoring, advancing and enforcing its constitutional promise to extend all civil, legal and political rights and protections to all American citizens, regardless of race, under law.
Since 1865 and the end of the Civil War, the day has been celebrated informally, first as a cultural holiday by newly freed slaves and their descendants across the American South, then by American Blacks centering on arts, food and music festivals in the 1920s and 1930s. During the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, Juneteenth evolved again, focusing on racial discrimination and the need for social change. But it wasn’t until 2021, following the national uproar over the killing of George Floyd and the pandemic’s outsized death toll on Black Americans, that Juneteenth was made a federal holiday to acknowledge our promise of racial equality and the work still needed to achieve it.
President Biden, in his 2021 proclamation to make Juneteenth a federal holiday, called it ”a day to remember the moral stain of slavery and the long legacy of systemic racism, inequality and inhumanity … and a day to recommit ourselves to the work of equality and justice, to celebrate our incredible capacity to heal, hope and emerge from our darkest moments with purpose and resolve.”
Divisions Endure
While all states now recognize Juneteenth as a holiday, only 27 states and the District of Columbia, for 2024, have made Juneteenth an annualized paid holiday for state employees, with the remainder maintaining at least a ceremonial observance.
Divisions also remain this election year, systemically and politically—on race and Americans’ opinions on the legacy of slavery in America. According to Pew Research, only 27% of registered voters who support Donald Trump for president this election year say the legacy of slavery affects the position of Black people in America today “a great deal” or “a fair amount,” while 73% of these Trump supporters say slavery has had little or no impact.
Opinions among Biden supporters are nearly the opposite, Pew says, with 79% saying slavery’s legacy still affects the position of Black people in America today, with only 20% saying slavery’s legacy has not had much effect, if any at all.
“This year, amid renewed racial tensions and efforts to diminish the voting rights of Black Americans and some efforts by some conservatives to exclude key aspects of Black history from what is taught in American history classes, we still live in a time when Juneteenth should be a powerful reminder of what is possible but also what is still needed to advance democracy’s credibility,” says Jendayi Frazer, a Distinguished Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the former Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs in the Bush administration.
George Selim, a senior vice president at the Anti-Defamation League and former Homeland Security director for community partnerships in the Bush and Obama administrations, wrote in an essay for Politico magazine that “America’s white supremacist movement is still less in a state of defeat as in a state of regrouping—the dangers of which cannot be overstated.”
Signs of Light
Hannah Drake, a spoken-word poet, visual artist and author—and Kwame Scruggs, an educator— are storytellers who have won national awards and scholarly recognition for their exploration of historic narratives, to help new generations of Americans expand their knowledge of Black history, resilience and achievement.
I first met Kwame and Hannah early last fall on the Omega Institute’s sprawling, 250-acre Hudson Valley campus, where I was filming a short-form documentary on racial healing for a British news organization and the Harlem Wellness Center nonprofit.
What follows is a quick look at their projects and how, in their own words, these initiatives build on the spirit of what Juneteenth represents.
The Alchemy Project
Kwame, a devotee of the late, acclaimed literary critic and mythology expert Joseph Campbell, teaches the hero’s journey to high school dropouts in Akron, Ohio, using ancient Greek and Roman myths to help them advance their self-knowledge and overcome their anger and emotional pain.
“I start by teaching them chiefly about the hero’s journey—how a hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than themselves,” Kwame says. His favorite text, and one popular with his students, he says, is Michael Meade’s classic text, Water of Life, which addresses the important issue of men and violence in modern culture. At once a mythic journey, a study of psychology and a treatise on initiation, the story, Kwame says, “helps students discover the wisdom and guidance of the ages so they can relate these stories to themselves and find a purpose for their lives in the turbulent times in which they and we now live.”
All 31 stories Kwame performs and reads through with them function as a core symbol for both personal and cultural renewal, and for the redemption of nature from a wasteland. “I’ve found that telling youth that they are on a dangerous path or are doing something wrong, they become defensive,” Kwame says. “But if you tell them through a story, it allows students to look at the history of slavery and the traumas experienced in their modern lives objectively, to relate these stories to their own lives.”
“… The goal is to help these boys and young men see themselves in these stories,” Kwame says. “Myths have been around for thousands and thousands of years, so they provide us with a roadmap to navigate our way through life. …I haven’t been successful with all students, but most end up having their lives turned around, using the stories to inspire them to ‘heal thyself’ before healing others. We look at the character traits of the hero and have them incorporate and trace the hero onto their own lives, and absorb the lesson of not giving up.”
The (Un)Known Project
Hannah Drake’s (Un)Known Project in Louisville, where she resides with her daughter, is both a memorial to enslaved people in Kentucky—many of whose stories will never be uncovered—and a challenge to the public to unearth and share those narratives which may be “hidden in attics and archives, in family genealogies and in corporate histories.” The hope, she says, is to help shift the narratives about former slaves from the category of “forgotten” to “known.”
Hannah says she got the idea to create this project after visiting Natchez, Miss., and its Museum of African American History and Culture, where she saw a map showing the slavery route from Louisville down the Ohio River to the Mississippi River, to Natchez—in the 1800s, one of the largest slave-trading cities in the United States. By the 1850s, she learned, Kentucky was one of the leading states exporting people to the deep South—at the rate of about 2,500 to 4,000 a year. “I knew Louisville was instrumental in the slave trade,” Hannah says. “But I didn’t know how intricate and deep.”
She then conducted further research into the fate of the enslaved at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice museum in Montgomery, Ala., and discovered records of freed slaves lynched by racial terror in the South. Many of those lynchings were recorded in public records, but without identifying details, and listing those killed as being “unknown.” Before Hannah left the museum that day she said, she thought of two words: Unknown Project.
Fast forward to 2021. On June 19th of that year, the nation’s first federal Juneteenth holiday, Hannah and her work partner, Josh Miller, unveiled what had become the (Un)Known Project in Louisville to challenge the public to unearth narratives that may exist but have not yet been shared about some of the former slaves and their their histories. She has since begun work to help create records for present day families to find and encourage residents to come forth.
“I don’t want people to feel any shame in sharing names and histories of former slaves,” Hannah told the New York Times. Already, she says, people—black and white— have contacted her and Josh, sharing names of enslaved people—in one case on a family ledger, in another in a will. “It’s okay to release those names if you have them. To me, it’s healing on both sides,” she says.
“…All our lives are better on Juneteenth and on other days,” she added in an interview, “when we can tell the full story of America in hundreds of different ways that are personal, we can help ourselves and so many others to better understand our evolution as a nation and the pain and the promise —and the work still needed and left to be done, for us all, and with us all, looking forward.”
For more about Kwame’s work, check out this interview with the Pacifica Graduate Institute. For more on Hannah’s project, check out her story in The New York Times and watch this video made by Voice of America about her personal journey that led to her present-day work.
Have some Juneteenth stories and remembrances to share? We’re eager to hear more!
thank you for the article on the juneteenth holiday. in my formative years, we were told that juneteenth was a celebration not meant for "us." that says tons about the lack of Black history education in my generation - it's encouraging and inspiring to see the holiday getting "shout outs" which in turn signals its growing significance in American culture.