April 11, 2025 | Vol. 54, Issue 7

The only bilingual Chinese-English Newspaper in New England

Juneteenth: A Time for America to Celebrate and Repair

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.

Related articles

Ping Pong Serves as a Bridge Between Cultures, Generations

As many families across the country celebrated Thanksgiving with traditional turkey dinners, a group of local Asian Americans marked the occasion by competing in a ping pong tournament. Inside the Malden High School gym, students and adults competed during the holiday in the event led by Mei Hung, executive director of the Chinese Culture Connection. “Like other sports and arts, ping pong helps people who have language barriers communicate,” Hung said, adding that holding different divisions allowed participants of all […]

Running For Community, Honor, and Culture: Asian Americans and the Boston Marathon

Editor’s Note: In honor of AAPI Month, Sampan presents the first of two video essays produced by guest correspondents from Boston University. The second will appear in our May 26 issue. Meghan Irons, Sampan Guest Editor, provides the capsule summary below. Every year of the running of the Boston Marathon there are stories to tell — stories about the runners, their sacrifices, and the history of their journeys. But often one thing gets overshadowed — the Asian American legacy in […]

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