It’s not a feeling of guilt. It’s a feeling of ‘discovered ignorance' - Clint Smith

Black-and-white photographs and film footage can convince us that these episodes transpired in a distant past, untouched by our contemporary world. Segregation shaped every aspect of my grandmother's education.

When I think of emancipation, I think of all of the people who fought for freedom but who never got a chance to experience it. The end of slavery did not happen overnight, it came from intergenerational work by those who fought for a better world they knew they might never see

when I think of Juneteenth, part of what I think about is the both-handedness of it, that it is this moment in which we mourn the fact that freedom was kept from hundreds of thousands of enslaved people for years and for months after it had been attained by them, and then, at the same time, celebrating the end of one of the most egregious things that this country has ever done.