Jubilant noise greeted me in my first spring living in DC. I was walking to lunch with coworkers downtown with no awareness of the festivities that marked April 16, 1862. Congress and Abraham Lincoln abolished slavery in the city nine months before the more storied proclamation.

DC residents know Emancipation Day, but until last year I was still clueless about the widespread celebration of June 19, 1865: General Order No. 3. This slow-moving revelation alerted 250,000 enslaved Black Texans of their freedom a full two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation took effect.

Momentum for recognition swelled last summer, and I actually drafted parts of this newsletter then with the note: "Juneteenth 2021 - new federal holiday?"

The interim has provided clarity and complexity.

A triumph now, yes, but accompanied by crucial acknowledgements that the holiday wasn't created because of an 1865 military order or the latest legislation. It exists because communities "celebrated it for years, decades, more than a century, in the teeth of Jim Crow segregation and racist violence."

In other words, the newest federal holiday is notable not only for the history it reminds us of, but also for the indomitable vitality of Black agency that continues today. People pushed for this from the earliest hours after the Civil War (listen to this! start at 8:40) through to modern activists like Opal Lee.

At 94 years old, Lee joined a conversation with one of my favorite communities, CreativeMornings. "I’m still on Cloud Nine," she said of the holiday she and generations before her helped enact. "Joyful. Humble. And knowing that this is just one step."

Winds rustled the pasture grasses of her urban farm outside Fort Worth, Texas.

"How can we incorporate the lessons of history, including your own lived experiences, into the path ahead?" I asked her during the Q&A.

"Education," she said as she nodded from her chair, sunglasses on. "Education is the place to start."

A few resources that have helped me learn:
"We search for what often cannot be found." (The Atlantic)
The Birth of Juneteenth (Library of Congress)
Celebration of Resilience (Smithsonian)

As Americans, the jubilee begins again as we wake from the "coolness / Of snug unawareness."