Though Channing Godfrey Peoples’ directorial debut “Miss Juneteenth” is named for the holiday often called “Black Independence Day” or “Freedom Day,” the film is not a history lesson. At least not …
” is named for the holiday often called “Black Independence Day” or “Freedom Day,” the film is not a history lesson. At least not entirely. And with the film’s release on the 155th anniversary of the holiday, Peoples can’t help but find the moment little bittersweet.
The movie follows Turquoise Jones , a single mother working to put her daughter through the Miss Juneteenth scholarship pageant, which she herself had won as a teen. Growing up in Fort Worth, Texas, Peoples grew up celebrating the holiday — which commemorates June 19, 1865, the day news reached slaves in Texas that the Emancipation Proclamation had been signed two and a half years earlier, marking the official end of slavery in America — and the annual beauty pageant was part of the festivities.
“When I left Texas, especially when I went off to grad school in California, I would say to people, ‘Happy Juneteenth!’ They would just kind of look at me curiously,” Peoples recalls. “It was a constant education about what Juneteenth was and that was interesting because it was just so much a part of the fabric of my life growing up.”
“And one of the things that really resonates with me as an adult is no matter what they were going through, they always had this dignity and this gracefulness and they all had this hope at the end of the day, no matter how difficult things got,” she adds. “I was really writing this story about the beauty of this community as well, because this community has beauty, but it also has people who have this sense of grit and resilience.
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