The House of Representatives voted on 16 June to honour the day slavery was outlawed in the US. Philosopher Lewis R Gordon contemplates this victory for democracy.
Galveston’s Blacks already knew they were free, so did their slaveholders, who nonetheless kept them in bondage — not by deceit or ignorance, but by the brute force and dehumanizing torture they'd used for 200 years.
Juneteenth commemorates the day that the last enslaved African Americans in Galveston, Texas were finally able to claim freedom from illegal chattel slavery.
I wanted to show my children what “biracial” really meant, piecing together their father’s Scottish and Russian Jewish ancestry with my Black Arkansas and San Francisco roots.