Editor’s Note: Monday, June 19th marked the third annual Massachusetts recognition of Juneteenth as a national and state holiday. This year, only 28 states and the District of Columbia will legally recognize it as a public holiday. In Montana, Arizona, North Dakota, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Iowa, Wisconsin, Indiana, Kentucky, Florida, South Carolina, Vermont, New Hampshire, Alaska and Hawaii it remained unrecognized as a permanent holiday. Juneteenth is a floating holiday in California, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina, with some state government workers given the option of taking the day off.
Here at Sampan, we commemorate June 19 as the date that all enslaved Black Americans were finally notified of their freedom, nearly two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation. Freedom comes with a price and emancipation can take a lifetime.
The legacy of enslavement remains a bitter and divisive truth that some may want to dismiss as a vestige of the past. We hope that the Juneteenth holiday brought for you a time to reflect, meditate, and activate your spirits to understand that a shameful past can be the prologue to a hopeful future. With that in mind, a new exhibit on slavery in Boston opened Friday June 16. We can’t understand our past until we face it.