- Just ahead on Black Issues Forum, from the origins of the holiday to traditions, food, art, and community gatherings that sustain it, we examine how Juneteenth continues to shape our understanding of freedom, citizenship, and belonging in America.

And we ask, what does freedom mean today?

And what can Juneteenth teach us about America's past and its future?

Coming up next, stay with us.

- Quality public television is made possible through the financial contributions of viewers like you, who invite you to join them in supporting PBS NC.

(upbeat music) ♪ - Welcome to Black Issues Forum, I'm Kenia Thompson.

Every June, communities across the country gather to celebrate Juneteenth, commemorating June 19th, 1865, when enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, finally learned they were free, more than two years after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

While it has become a federal holiday, Juneteenth is more than just a date on the calendar.

It's about memory.

It's about understanding that freedom, and it's about imagining what freedom can look like for future generations.

Joining me now are two people helping us explore the history, meaning, and continued relevance of Juneteenth.

Dr.

Blair L. M. Kelley is the director of the National Humanities Center, as well as a historian, author, and professor, whose work examines black history, citizenship, and freedom.

Her book, "Black Freedom, A Visual History of Juneteenth and Emancipation Days," and additional work on Juneteenth help illuminate how black communities have preserved these stories across generations.

Also joining us is artist and cultural organizer, Derrick Beasley, through projects like Open Studio, and his work documenting Durham's creative community.

Derrick explores memory, identity, and the importance of preserving black stories through art.

I want to thank you both for being here.

- Thanks for having me.

- Of course.

I'll start with this question.

What does Juneteenth represent today?

And how have we seen that meaning evolve over the decades?

Blair, I'll start with you.

- I think Juneteenth is a turning point.

You know, having this national holiday, having a moment when we are contesting the meaning of black history, I think it's a wonderful opportunity for us to really reclaim the deeper meanings of freedom and make a public statement about its importance in this time.

It has that historical root, but it also challenges us to think about what's relevant today.

And so it's a really profound opportunity to teach history, but to also engage in the process of making freedom relevant.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

Derrick, what does it mean?

- You know, anytime black folks have a chance to gather, I think it's important that we do so.

And anytime we can do that specifically in the name of freedom-making or freedom-making project, I think it's even more important.

And so to me, Juneteenth is an opportunity for us to get together, be with each other in a way that is unfiltered, in a way that is, you know, reconnecting with that sense of home that we have in our own communities.

And so, yeah, I think Juneteenth is an opportunity to practice freedom-making and be visionary about it.

- Mm-hmm.

Now, Blair, you've written a book.

- Yeah.

- Tell us a little bit about this book and why you found it important to highlight the things that you did in this book.

- So it's a visual history book.

So it's a coffee table book.

It's beautiful, and it sits on your table.

But it's also a way of teaching the history and the meaning of Juneteenth and Emancipation Day celebrations that were celebrated across the country and across the globe.

And so what I thought was important was for us to all remember that while we have the Texas tradition and Black Texans ended up giving us this wonderful national holiday, and I think they had the most robust Emancipation Day celebrations in the country, but they were everywhere.

- Yeah.

- Everywhere celebrated their freedom.

I write in an essay about Raleigh's celebrations and Richmond's celebration because they also had these rich traditions.

And so what I wanted to do was remind all of us that this isn't just a Texas thing, but that Black Americans were so excited to mark their freedom, and they were excited to participate in the process of remembering their history.

I think they knew it would be contested from the very beginning.

- Right.

- And so that they wanted to mark down their contributions to the Civil War.

They wanted their young people to know what they had survived.

And they wanted to pass those things down.

And as you said, they wanted to gather.

- Yeah.

- They wanted to reclaim family.

- So what commonalities or themes have you seen across the different states and regions that celebrate Juneteenth?

- I think a consciousness about the importance of history.

So often we think of the enslaved as outside of these processes or asleep to what was going on around them.

What you see is that they were very focused on the promise of freedom at all times, and they were ready.

In 1865, they were ready to show up for each other, to build community, to really push the country toward a clearer definition of freedom.

And they transformed the country.

And so they're not just an afterthought.

They were central to the American project of freedom.

And so I think the book does a good job of retelling that story in a broad way, in an inclusive way, and in a way that all Americans can benefit from.

- I love that.

Derrick, you're an artist, and you've said that Juneteenth is an opportunity for black people to be unapologetically black.

How does that show up in your artwork?

And what does it look like in practicality for those of us that aren't artists to be unapologetically black?

- I've lived a professional life before I was an independent artist.

(laughs) And we all have navigated, or most black folks have navigated spaces where we felt like we had to sacrifice something.

So sacrifice a piece of our culture or our identity, whether it's for safety, whether it's to put food on the table, to keep your job.

And so I think it's critical that we practice what it means just to be us without putting on airs or trying to filter ourselves or dialing ourselves down.

And so I think being unapologetically black is about dropping that code switch.

(laughs) We just popped up some of your images.

I pulled some.

There's images with multiple arms and hands, and there's a gentleman with two sets of eyes.

Talk about, I guess, the creativity that went behind that.

Just explain the thought process behind the imagery.

- Yeah, yeah.

That's a project from a few years ago called Black Holes.

And really, it kind of borrows from themes around space and technology and futurism, and uses that as an entry point to conversations about who we need to be.

So thinking about a black hole is this entity that kind of sucks everything in.

It forces things to change, but also spits things out in a new form.

And so I think about change as not being this negative thing but this thing that if we lean into it, there are endless possibilities on the other side.

And so that's also my approach to community building.

That's my approach to making spaces and cultural organizing as well.

- Yeah.

Blair, you know, Juneteenth is fairly new in the things that we celebrate as a community.

Have you seen pushback from communities or lack of understanding from communities?

And so, well, why are we celebrating this?

- Yeah, absolutely.

I was giving a talk in Virginia a few weeks ago and a gentleman in the question and answer said, "Well, this is nice and all, but we're not Texas "and this doesn't have anything to do with us."

- Right.

- And I think, you know, what's powerful is when we think of ourselves as interconnected.

So I told him the story of a black Virginian, Jack Yates, who was, his family was enslaved and he had become free.

And the slave owner of the family who held his wife and children in bondage was gonna move to Texas to try and preserve his slaves and fight back against the Civil War.

So he was headed to the Houston area.

And so Jack Yates voluntarily re-enslaved himself so he could stay with his family.

- Wow.

- And so he ends up being in Houston at the moment of emancipation.

And he ends up being one of the progenitors of the Emancipation Park that's still there.

And he's one of four black men in Houston who purchased the land to become the first public park in Houston where they can permanently celebrate the emancipation.

And so a Virginian, a family from Virginia, ends up in Texas being the maker.

And so it was interesting to, you know, to push back in Virginia, a place close to where Jack Yates was from, and to say, no, this is all our story.

We are interconnected as a people.

And when we think in those terms of interconnection and generatively about who we are, we can do so much more.

And so Juneteenth is for all black Americans, and it's certainly for Americans because the question of freedom is all of our questions.

- It is all of our questions.

Derrick, when we think about celebrating Juneteenth and the creativity that comes around that, 'cause we know that just, we're musical people, we're artists, right?

We are creative.

What does that look like to create meaningful community events surrounded with artistry and creativity and really make it just, well, more than just an event and something meaningful?

- Great question.

(laughs) I think culture is like both the ends and the means in terms of freedom-making.

I think it's the thing that we fight for and the tool that we use to fight for it.

And so I often try to leverage cultural activations to ignite that sense of like, that people's deepest sense of humanity, I think.

When people connect with food, they feel the most at home.

When people connect with music, it sparks back a memory, smells, all of these things that are the meat of life that sometimes when we think about freedom-making, we're like, oh, we gotta change this policy X, Y, Z. And oftentimes, history is told as a succession of policies, but it's also like the cultural changes.

And I think the culture is what makes the policy stick and what makes the policy possible.

And so that's why I think that's kind of the core of my own creative practice.

- Yeah, now I know that there's an event coming up this weekend.

You both are gonna be participating in Juneteenth events.

What, for example, is your role in curating an event?

- Yeah, well, this particular event, I'm co-curating with Marcella Kamara, who's a long-time collaborator.

I'm marketing and gathering the people, leveraging my own social capital to do so, but also thinking about each element of the event and how that's gonna connect people to one another, how it might catalyze them towards some other form of engagement in community or civic engagement.

And then also making sure folks are safe is really the core.

And emotionally safe, energetically safe, but also physically safe.

And so a lot of intention goes into all of those things.

- And what kinds of events or activities, like what can people participate in?

- Sure, so I'll be doing portraits of folks, which is kind of core to the Open Stew concept.

That's one of my primary mediums.

Folks will be able to get food from the Palace International, which doesn't currently have a brick and mortar, but if you're from Durham-- - That's good food.

- If you know, you know.

- It's good food, yeah.

- We'll have watermelons provided by Tall Grass Food Box, which is a business of mine.

We'll also have an archive station by Daughters of the Library, which is Marcella Kamara's project, where people will be able to scan photos of their family, of their own history, be able to download things, and print things.

And then also engage with other black cultural ephemera, like art books.

And so people will be able to kind of have this multi-sensory experience to connect with the concept of Juneteenth.

- Blair, let's talk about the significance of red foods.

You mentioned food's gonna be Palace International, right?

And we do see a lot of, I guess that, forgive my lack of knowing color terminology, but that spectrum, right, within the red family.

What is the significance of that?

- So it's African food way, right?

So it's a hibiscus tea, with sort of like a celebratory drink.

The watermelon also, which really, you know, it's such an interesting fruit because it has a stereotype connected to it.

And yet it was liberatory for so many black communities.

It was a way for them to build wealth and to use their skills to market something that people wanted.

And so stigmatizing it was really a way to undercut the power of black business folks.

But so those red tones are reminiscent.

And, you know, people think about the sacrifice.

You know, it's symbolic of the sacrifice, the blood of the ancestors as well.

And so the color ways of Juneteenth really are representative of teaching the history, being interconnected with the things that are familiar, you know, red velvet cake and red drink and all the things that black people like when they get together and see it's festive.

And, you know, it hearkens back to those earlier memories and those earlier connections.

- Yeah.

As we are approaching America's 250th anniversary, how do these two things sit side by side, do they?

And I'll just leave it there.

- For me, America couldn't have gotten to 250 without the black experience.

Couldn't have gotten to become an established nation, a wealthy nation without the exploitation of black people.

The enslavement of black people, you know, is the foundation upon which the country could grow.

You know, Thomas Jefferson could imagine a free nation as he looked out of the window and saw enslaved people working and laboring in his yard.

And so he had the ability to have that leisure because he was exploiting people, including his own kin on that land.

And so it's a messy and tied complication that, you know, we shouldn't shy away from.

It's part of who we are.

It's part of who this nation was.

And so to think about the nation reaching 250 years is to think about the good and the bad, the difficult and the challenging.

I think black Americans really provide a deeper sense of what the sacrifice was, what was required.

And then the ways in which they have selflessly built the strength of this nation and been wonderful citizens, been soldiers, served in wars, served community, built family, built education, built the building blocks of our citizenship.

Citizenship wasn't even fully defined in the Constitution until the enslaved were emancipated and we needed the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to really cement what it meant to be a free citizen.

Those are still contested, evidently, but those building blocks were set by the cause of black liberty.

And so you can't think about America without thinking about black America and our contributions.

- Yeah.

Derrick, what are your thoughts on the two?

- I don't think about the one too much, personally.

(laughs) If I'm being honest.

I think January 4th is an opportunity for us to have hot dogs, be off work.

I think when I think about Juneteenth, I feel like the juxtaposition of the two, it is much more the practice of what the promise of July 4th stands for.

And so I think, yes, I think Juneteenth is about that practice of freedom making.

- As we are coming from a time and going into a time where people are challenging a lot of the things that are happening, right?

Kendrick Lamar's Super Bowl, we see that people are using music, and especially younger, this is more where I'm going, right?

So our younger generations are vocalizing their ability to speak against a lot of the things that they see happening in this country.

Juneteenth, however, I guess maybe I'm asking, are our younger generation seeing the true importance of Juneteenth or are they just maybe utilizing it as this vehicle just to kind of speak loud and or are both one in the same?

- I think any moment is an opportunity.

And so some people are gonna take that opportunity and enjoy it, some people are just gonna take the day off and have a good time.

And both are fine, but I love an open door.

And I love the idea of a chance to tell a deeper story.

One of my favorite historians is Beyonce.

So in her football performance, she used the flower wagons that were part of historic Juneteenth celebration and laced the wagon wheels with flowers in the ways that they had done in Houston, 100 years prior, 120 years prior.

And so there are ways in our culture, in our performance, in our art, in our music to draw on that history.

And I think young people are interested more so than we would expect in those connections and those ties and debating it and thinking about it.

- Are they having to learn this information on their own or is it being taught in schools?

- I mean, I didn't learn this kind of history-- - I didn't either.

- In public high school.

The way that we teach history oftentimes is just so focused on dates and memorization and who was the president in what era.

I think that that richer, broader history is something that people are interested in once they know it exists and once they're privy to it.

And so I hope that things like my book can become a gateway.

You don't have to, you can spend 15 minutes with it and look at some images and they can become tools for your own analysis.

You sit with the picture, you see what you see.

You as an artist know this, right?

That the way that we interpret an image or sit with something gives us a gateway for our own thinking and our own inquiry.

And so I hope that texts like my book really do provide space for all kinds of people to engage with their own thinking about what these things mean.

- And Derrick, as an artist, you choose how you want to express.

And so, I guess, are there limitations to how someone wants to express their joy in Juneteenth or how they choose to celebrate the holiday?

- I'm absolutely not for policing people on what they do or don't do on Juneteenth.

I've had conversations with people who say, "Why are we celebrating this thing "that's related to them giving us freedom?"

And I can respect people's perspective.

I think I encourage people, like what you said about being invitational.

I think it's an opportunity to be invitational for people to think critically about our history, where we've been, and then where we might go.

- And that raises a good point.

My next question was gonna be about the conversations that we should be having today about freedom, right?

Because we're seeing freedom taken in different ways from us today.

What are the conversations we should be having with the remembrance of Juneteenth and how, for two years, people didn't know they were free?

And are we repeating that same kind of history in other ways?

- I think, you know, I wanna always push back a little bit on the didn't know they were free, 'cause they weren't free, right?

They were still being coercively manipulated by a population that had fled to Texas in order to maintain slavery.

- Understood.

- And so, and the Confederacy in Texas had not conceded, right, so they didn't surrender.

They kept fighting.

There's a battle after Appomattox.

And so, they were in bondage and they were in danger.

And so, at the moment that they are finally supported in their freedom, that's the day they celebrate and that's the day that they know about it.

And so, I don't want it to be about ignorance.

I do think it's important for us to remember the awful coerciveness that those folks in Texas were going through.

But then they are the people who give the rest of us this opportunity to better define freedom for us.

Now, we have to remember that that's still at play.

Freedom is still a process.

It's not something that we can take for granted.

There will be times when there will be coercive power that makes it difficult to be as free as we should.

So, when we think about changes around voting rights, for example, in this moment, our ancestors thought that they had corrected that, that they had answered those questions, the laws were in place to protect folks from discriminating at the polls.

And yet, we see in this generation, the target is moving.

And so, I think it's a reminder that freedom is a process and it's always contested and the struggle to maintain it will always be active once.

So, that's why we have to teach the history 'cause we gotta use those old recipes and make sure that we know where we came from, what was done, and how we can innovate in this moment.

- Yeah, Derrick, same question to you.

- Well, what you were saying about, the question about young people, when I was a child, we didn't talk about Juneteenth, definitely not in school.

It might've been something that we knew about, but it wasn't as deep a practice.

And I think in the last five to 10 years, I would say the youth are maybe more engaged, at least around the concept.

And I think that's something that we can't take for granted.

- How do we spark conversation through art?

- Yeah, so I think portraiture particularly is inherently dialogic.

Like it's me and the subject in conversation, whether it's verbal or not.

And so, whatever we create together is a shared meeting that we're making together.

And so, I think inviting people into an artistic practice is how you connect most deeply with your humanity.

And so I think the title of artist is something that, we kind of give to people who have particular craft skills, but I think artistry is really just connecting with your humanity in its rawest form and metabolizing emotion and understanding in a free way.

And so everybody has that capacity.

And so I think when I think about freedom-making and art is one of the best ways to do it because it's inherent to the process.

- Yeah, I love that.

Blair, as we wrap up, we're in our last couple of minutes here and Juneteenth will come and it will go.

What are some ways that we can still keep the meaning alive and maybe some of the things that you've observed in your historical study of how people continue to keep the meaning, the true meaning of Juneteenth alive even after the date?

- Yeah, so for me, Juneteenth is a gateway to understand that the emancipatory practices of our ancestors happened all throughout the calendar year.

They were celebrating the Emancipation Proclamation dates on January 1st.

They were thinking about Carter G. Woods and then the Negro History Week which becomes Black History Month.

There's so many times in the year when you can be intentional about passing this history down.

And so I think Juneteenth is that open door but it's always something that we should be thinking about and engaging with and teaching our young people and teaching communities about the real history, the contested history.

Our ancestors were doing that work.

They were contesting history as it was happening.

The Confederate monuments were going up in communities and they were marching around them and pushing back with their own clear narrative of what had actually happened.

- I love that.

Thank you, Dr.

Blair L. M. Kelley.

- Thank you for having me.

- Derrick Beasley, thank you both for being here.

- Thank you.

- Thanks so much.

- And I thank you for watching.

If you want more content like this, we invite you to engage with us on Instagram using the hashtag #BlackIssuesForum.

You can also find our full episodes on pbsnc.org/blackissuesforum and on the PBS video app.

I'm Kenia Thompson, I'll see you next time.

(upbeat music) ♪ - Quality public television is made possible through the financial contributions of viewers like you who invite you to join them in supporting PBS NC.