I think that's progress. I think that represents Americans coming to recognize what those statues were erected for. They weren't erected as memorials… - Jamelle Bouie

[L]eaving home is hard, and the of wealth makes it even harder.

why this moment? Why Juneteenth has sort of erupted in this way over the past couple weeks, why people find it so resonant right now is that Juneteenth is very much a holiday about the distance between freedom that is promised and freedom that is lived. And right now, millions of Americans are seeing with regards to police brutality, with regard to inequality, the distance that still exists between freedom and liberty, as we imagine it, as we have proclaimed it, and that has actually experienced by ordinary people.

The story of emancipation, going really back to the founding of the country all the way to the civil war is very much the story of enslaved Africans and freed blacks taking the initiative to put their freedom on the agenda of national politics. That's especially true during the Civil War. The war, as many people know, it does not begin as a war for abolition. It begins as a war for union. But as soon as the shooting starts, enslaved people are escaping to union lines. They're leaving work on plantations. They're offering their assistance to- to union soldiers as guides, as laborers and eventually as soldiers. And it's those actions that transform the war for union into a war for liberation, into a war for emancipation. And although Juneteenth commemorates those enslaved Africans who were whisked away to Texas to avoid the Emancipation Proclamation, I think it's still an opportunity for us to really think and take seriously the fact that emancipation does not happen without the actions of the enslaved, not just over the war, but really over the course of 80 years.