It would be a mistake to consider Juneteenth purely a celebration of emancipation. As with most victories against racism, there is also a story of resistance to change.
Here is a sampling of Juneteenth festivities happening in L.A. County this weekend to commemorate “Freedom Day” or “Emancipation Day.”For many of us, that starts within our own families, with tales of our forebears who migrated north, east and west after emancipation. “Enslaved people passed down the stories of who they were to their children,” said historian Blair L.M. Kelley, author of the new book “Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class.
It’s where Kelley begins “Black Folk,” a groundbreaking account of the Black working class in the generations that have come after Juneteenth. “The story that the book starts with is a story my mother told me all the time,” Kelley told me last week. It’s a story about her great-grandfather, a Georgia sharecropper cheated by a crooked plantation owner out of compensation. He took his family and headed north with Kelley’s maternal grandfather, only 14 at the time.
“You can’t tell the story of the working class without talking about migration,” said Kelley, a distinguished professor of Southern studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. “The reason we had to fight was because we just kept confronting all of this kind of corruption and evil over and over and over again.”
Since chattel slavery began here, Black worth and Black wealth have always been something to be fought over — and to be fought for. That story didn’t begin on Juneteenth, but it’s worth remembering that the emancipation we celebrate today did not grant Black folks the same equity in the nation their toil helped build.
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