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black history
Juneteenth and the Fight for Justice in Selma and Beyond
Juneteenth is a reminder of why the march for liberty and justice is not over, but a moment to recommit to the work ahead.
Jun 19, 2025
At Foot Soldiers Park, Juneteenth is more than a date on the calendar. It’s a declaration, a call to always remember, to resist, and to continue to reimagine what freedom looks like.
For the last four years Juneteenth has become a commemoration of historic significance that has become more powerful and more necessary. As a community, we gather not just to honor history, we gather to face the present and to envision a better future rooted in truth, justice, and collective power.
Juneteenth commemorates June 19, 1865, the day the last enslaved people in Galveston, Texas were finally told they were free—more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. That delay wasn’t a historical oversight, it was an intentional strategy of suppression that today, still shows up through the systems we confront daily.
We celebrate because freedom was never handed to us, we claimed it in 1865, in 1965, and we must claim it today.
Today one thing is clear, slavery didn’t end, it evolved. It’s been institutionalized in the form of mass incarceration, labor exploitation, generational poverty, voter suppression, and policies that consistently and disproportionately harm Black and Brown communities. One-hundred and sixty years later, Black and Brown people are still profiled, surveilled, underpaid, and denied full access to justice.
And yet, we are still here. Still resisting. Still building our communities up. Still rising.
Our hometown Selma is ground zero for the struggle for voting rights and the fight for the socioeconomic prosperity of people of color in our country. We both span two generations of Black people in Selma. One of us was among the 600 foot soldiers who bravely marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge and demanded voting rights for Black people—ultimately leading to the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. The other one of us was raised to carry that spirit of activism and determination to protect and preserve those rights for generations to come.
In 2021, at a historic moment for our country, we founded Foot Soldiers Park to preserve Selma’s legacy, memorialize the stories of the everyday people who fueled the civil rights movement, and to position the city’s historical significance into an engine for liberation, economic development, and racial justice.
With a mission rooted in the legacy of Selma’s foot soldiers, we don’t shy away from the truth, we walk directly into it. Because that’s where change is born and transformation begins. We don’t just preserve history, we activate it. We innovate. We organize. We lead.
Juneteenth is a reminder of why the march for liberty and justice is not over, but a moment to recommit to the work ahead.
Despite Selma’s historical significance in shaping the very fabric of this country, the majority-Black city is still struggling to overcome generations of institutional racism and overall neglect. Forty-one percent of the population lives in poverty. Thirty-percent are suffering from food insecurity, and an abysmal $27,000 a year is the average income in the city.
When we founded Foot Soldiers Park, we had a clear goal—to transform Selma; ask hard questions; and set a bold agenda to build generational wealth, protect our civil rights, and empower our youth to lead. We are campaigning to fund Selma’s first-ever community and education center, and foot soldiers memorial. This urgently needed hub will be a beacon for leaders, students, and educators to weave the rich tapestry of Selma’s civil rights movement and serve as a conduit for ongoing scholarship in this critical field. As our civil rights are again under attack, we’ll serve as a catalyst for community-led action and civic participation, healing and restoration, youth engagement and activation—building the bench for the next generation of political, business, and social justice leaders.
This Juneteenth we need to face the truth—there will be no erasure. What our history shows is how resilience can lead to transformation. Generation after generation we have turned pain into purpose, and memory into motivation to design systems that move us closer to justice.
As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “A right delayed is a right denied.” Juneteenth reminds us that justice delayed is not justice at all. Freedom withheld is not freedom for all. And the arc of the moral universe does not bend unless we bend it. Together.
For us Juneteenth is not just symbolic. It is sacred. It is strategic. It is where truth, joy, memory, and action converge.
Every year we celebrate because our people’s story does not end in chains. We celebrate because our ancestors did more than survive; they organized, educated, resisted, and loved. We celebrate because freedom was never handed to us, we claimed it in 1865, in 1965, and we must claim it today.
In Selma, we never rest and we don’t sugarcoat the truth. We are the foot soldiers of 1965 and the foot soldiers of tomorrow—as agents of change, we will keep marching forward.
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This Juneteenth, America Must Choose to Live Up to Its Founding Documents
When we limit conversations about our complex past, we not only lose historical accuracy but also our capacity for growth and the honest reckoning that could finally help us fulfill our founding promises.
Jun 19, 2025
In 1796, 22-year-old Ona Marie Judge became one of America's most wanted fugitives. Born into slavery and held by President George Washington, Judge escaped from Philadelphia and fled north to New Hampshire. Washington immediately began hunting her, placing newspaper advertisements offering rewards for her return. For over 50 years, she would live as a fugitive, knowing that bounty hunters could appear at any moment to drag her back into bondage. Her story of survival reveals tensions that we're still grappling with today.
Judge's escape revealed the America we rarely acknowledge in our founding stories. As efforts to silence discussions of race and history spread nationwide—from federal agencies barring recognition of Black History Month to more than 44 states, including my home state of New Hampshire, limiting how schools can discuss racism—her story demands our attention.
Judge's escape laid bare the America we rarely acknowledge in our founding mythology.
The paradoxes Judge witnessed still define us. Washington was not the infallible moral leader of our imagination, but a flesh-and-blood man who owned other human beings and spent years trying to recapture the woman who dared seek freedom. New Hampshire was not removed from slavery's horrors—Portsmouth had been a major slave trading port since the 1600s.
Judge's escape laid bare the America we rarely acknowledge in our founding mythology. These tensions were the defining forces that shaped America's first century and continue to do so today. Judge's story illuminates how deeply slavery was woven into the fabric of the entire nation, connecting Black and white lives in ways our history books have long worked to hide. Understanding her experience becomes essential to understanding ourselves, especially as movements to obscure these complexities grow stronger.
The Pattern of Progress and Backlash
This current backlash against Black history education shouldn't surprise us—it follows a persistent American pattern. Every period of racial progress has triggered fierce resistance designed to roll back gains and rewrite the past. After Reconstruction brought Black political participation and civil rights, the country allowed Jim Crow laws to flourish and KKK terror to reign while Confederate monuments were erected across the South to rewrite the Civil War as a noble struggle rather than a fight to preserve slavery. The rise of the war on drugs and mass incarceration of Black Americans followed the 1960s civil rights laws. The election of the first Black president, Barack Obama, triggered the Tea Party movement and birtherism campaigns designed to delegitimize his presidency.
Today's attacks on how we discuss race and history represent the latest iteration of this cycle. When we limit conversations about our complex past, we not only lose historical accuracy but also our capacity for growth and the honest reckoning that could finally help us fulfill our founding promises.
Why Local Stories Matter
This ongoing struggle is why the work happening in New Hampshire—a politically purple state where Black residents make up just 2% of the population—offers constructive lessons for the rest of the nation. If honest conversations about Black history can flourish here, they can do so anywhere; however, success requires understanding what we like to use as a guideline: the rule of thirds. One third will support, one third will be persuaded, and one third will oppose. The progress is determined by the persuadable middle. We've seen how we can make real change by reaching that crucial middle group in New Hampshire.
Look no further than our annual July 4 readings of Frederick Douglass' "What to the Slave Is Your Fouth of July" speech, which has grown from one participating town to 22, with communities reading simultaneously across the state. From synagogues to rural town halls, people gather simply to hear Douglass' words—no discussion required, no positions demanded. This creates space for reflection and connection without the political battles that often shut down conversation before it begins.
Judge's legacy calls us to specific action: Resist erasure wherever we encounter it—in our children's schools, local libraries, state legislatures, and national debates.
Building unexpected alliances has proven equally powerful. Working with the Daughters of the American Revolution to install historical markers honoring Black Revolutionary War heroes demonstrates that historical truth enriches rather than threatens our understanding of patriotism. We've now placed nearly 40 markers throughout the state, each one making visible stories that were always there but rarely acknowledged.
This success stems from focusing on education and storytelling rather than confrontation, allowing facts and local narratives to speak for themselves. New Hampshire residents hunger for authentic stories about their own communities, even when those stories complicate their narratives about the past.
From resistance to Reckoning
The power of personal narrative will be on full display this Juneteenth, as Portsmouth hosts an unprecedented gathering where direct descendants of America's founding fathers and the people they enslaved come together to explore our intertwined histories. Shannon LaNier, the ninth-generation descendant of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, will join Laurel Guild Yancey, descendant of Portsmouth's Prince Whipple, a Black man who fought in the Revolutionary War while enslaved by Declaration of Independence signer William Whipple. In a profound twist of history, the Whipple family would later become the very people who provided sanctuary to Ona Judge when she sought refuge in Portsmouth—the same family line that had owned Prince Whipple would become her protectors, demonstrating how the arc of justice sometimes bends through the most unexpected transformations.
When descendants sit together sharing these narratives, they reveal how the stories of America's founding fathers and the people they enslaved have been inseparably linked across generations. These family histories, passed down through centuries, offer living proof that our nation's racial past isn't separate and distinct, but intimately woven together from the very beginning. Their gathering in Judge's adopted hometown creates a bridge across time, connecting her story of resistance to our current moment of choice.
After all, her choice to flee slavery, knowing the dangers ahead, required extraordinary courage. She lived in poverty, often depending on charity, and had outlived her three children and husband when she died in 1848. Yet she chose uncertainty over oppression, a fugitive's life over bondage, never abandoning her claim to freedom despite facing consequences far more severe than anything we encounter today.
The free Black families in Portsmouth who risked everything to shelter her further demonstrate that resistance has always been collective work, requiring people to see their own freedom as incomplete while others remained in chains. Their courage offers a template for our current moment, when we need that same spirit of collective action.
Judge's legacy calls us to specific action: Resist erasure wherever we encounter it—in our children's schools, local libraries, state legislatures, and national debates. Speak up when school boards attempt to ban books that tell the full story of American history. Engage with the persuadable middle in our communities, attend town halls, and vote for leaders who understand that historical truth strengthens, rather than weakens, our democracy. Most importantly, discover the complete stories of all who have lived in your community—Indigenous peoples, Black families, immigrants, and others whose experiences have been overlooked—and support those working to bring these histories to light.
This Juneteenth, as conversations unfold in the place where Judge found refuge, her story asks us to choose: Will we allow fear to silence these essential truths, or will we find the courage to engage in the honest reckoning needed to fulfill the promises of equality our founding documents made to all Americans?
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Why GOP Attempts to Sanitize History Will Fail
History doesn’t disappear when you shut down a website, threaten a museum’s funding, or remove museum exhibits. We carry the past within us.
May 04, 2025
In March, U.S. President Donald Trump issued an executive order titled Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, targeting the Smithsonian Institution and its museums—including the National Museum of African American History and Culture—for promoting “divisive narratives.” In doing so, Trump continues a pattern of erasing federal websites about notable African Americans and undermining institutions that honor our full national story.
Trump’s campaign echoes other recent efforts to whitewash the past. For example, Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves proclaimed April as Confederate Heritage Month, and recognized Confederate Memorial Day as a state holiday—one of several Southern states that continue to honor the Confederacy. These endeavors are part of a coordinated attempt to revise the Confederacy’s racist history and diminish the impact of slavery in the Civil War.
Last month, reports emerged of historic artifacts being removed from the African American History Museum. In response, civil rights leaders have formed a coalition and will hold a “Freedom to Learn” campaign and march at the museum. They know what I do: that the GOP’s coordinated efforts to whitewash the past cannot erase the truth we carry within us.
I did not have to go to the Smithsonian’s National African American History Museum to learn this history; it is seared in my memory and encoded in my and this nation’s DNA.
As an African American originally from Memphis, Tennessee, I learned about our nation’s complicated history from a young age. I grew up in the city where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, where my parents were born under the yoke of Jim Crow segregation, and where cotton was king during slavery.
Some of that history I learned in school. Most of it came from my family who lived that history. They taught me not just to remember, but to bear witness.
Even the physical landscape of the South helped tell the story: Confederate monuments, parks, and highways named after Confederate generals. I saw the Confederate flag and “Riding with Forrest” bumper stickers, referencing Nathan Bedford Forrest, who helped found the Ku Klux Klan. They were everyday reminders of the brutal history of slavery that refused to stay buried.
I did not have to go to the Smithsonian’s National African American History Museum to learn this history; it is seared in my memory and encoded in my and this nation’s DNA. That’s why the GOP’s campaign to rewrite history will fail.
Recently, I visited D.C. with my 73-year-old mother. I was there to give a talk about my book, which examines how race and immigration status have affected access to healthcare. We visited the African American History Museum and Culture on a Monday. The line stretched outside, as it often does. Since opening in 2016, it has welcomed more than 12 million visitors—Black, white, young, old—each one seeking a fuller understanding of our shared past.
I had visited the museum before. But Trump’s latest threat made me want to return—and to bring my mom. As a child, she picked cotton and endured taunts from white kids as she and her siblings walked to their segregated school. She didn’t need the museum to validate her story. But it did. It also validated mine.
Inside, I stood with her in front of exhibits honoring W.E.B. DuBois and Ida B. Wells. Their legacy helped shape my career. As a sociologist, I teach about many of the historic events covered in the museum’s exhibits, which don’t shy away from the ugly contradictions of America’s founding ideals. Instead, they make them plain.
Etched inside the building is a quote from founding museum director Lonnie Bunch III: “[T]here is nothing more powerful… than a nation steeped in its history. And there are few things as noble as honoring our ancestors by remembering.”
That’s what this new wave of revisionism seeks to stop: truthful remembrance. But history doesn’t disappear when you shut down a website, threaten a museum’s funding, or remove museum exhibits. Despite banning books, stifling academic freedom, and targeting scapegoated groups that culminated in the genocide of European Jews, we still know about the Holocaust. Why? Because survivors carried that truth forward.
As we left the museum, another African American family was entering. The father asked me, half jokingly, “Have they changed anything in the museum yet?”
“No,” I said, “but that’s exactly why we came—before he [Trump] can.”
We smiled in shared acknowledgment. That exchange shows why the GOP’s efforts to erase the truth are sparking the opposite effect: a renewed urgency to preserve it.
Regardless of what happens to the museum or Confederate Memorial Day commemorations, that unfiltered history lives in us. In the words of James Baldwin, also etched on the museum’s walls: “The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it… history is literally present in all that we do.”
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