Happy Juneteenth, Y’all.

We Better Celebrate This One—Because at the Current Rate, We Might Not Have Another.

By Dr. Jeremiah J. Sims

I planned to join my city’s Juneteenth festivities today, but I hurt my knee wrestling around with my kids the other day. It’s still pretty swollen. So, now, I have a slight hitch in my giddy-up. Plus, and more importantly, our soon-to-be 6-year-old, Jehu, has a little bit of a fever. So, I elected to keep him home. I’ll have to experience it vicariously through Rachel and the rest of the crew this year.

I’d thought about writing something for Juneteenth, but I was equivocating. Then, I saw an article that spoke to how our president failed to acknowledge Juneteenth this year, even though he’d done so during his previous administration. Trump did not have to write a speech, or develop a cogent message on the significance of Juneteenth and why we as a pluralistic (at least aspirationally), multicultural society celebrate it. All he had to do was read a prepared statement. He couldn’t be bothered to do that apparently. He opted not to read a prepared statement on the significance of this holiday for millions of American’s. Instead, as per usual, he let his intrusive thoughts win.

Rather than acknowledge the event or significance of Juneteenth, Trump lamented the number of federal holidays we have. Seems like odd timing, right? It’s not irrational to think that his might just be the last Nationally recognized iteration of Juneteenth under this administration. It might be swallowed by the anti-woke, anti-DEI, and anti-Black (grand) dragon this administration controls. So, I hope we all live it up!

What is Juneteenth all about?

Today is Juneteenth, a day that celebrates the “freeing” of the last remaining enslaved people in the United States. But let’s be crystal clear: enslaved Black folks were not just freed—they fought valiantly for their own liberation. Juneteenth does not mark the moment justice was delivered. It marks the moment that justice could no longer be withheld—at least not in name.

On June 19, 1865, Union General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas and announced that the Civil War had ended and that slavery had been abolished. But by that point, the Emancipation Proclamation had been signed more than two years earlier—on January 1, 1863. For two and a half years, enslavers in Texas simply chose not to tell the people they held in bondage that they were already legally free. That silence was violent. That withholding was intentional.

The Emancipation Proclamation itself wasn’t nearly as broad-sweeping as many believe—it applied only to Confederate states in active rebellion and offered no material restitution to the formerly enslaved. In fact, in some places like Washington, D.C., it was white enslavers who received reparations—up to $300 per person for their “loss of property” under the Compensated Emancipation Act of 1862. The people who endured generations of racial terror received nothing. Not land. Not wages. Not safety. Certainly no 40 acres or mule. Just a declaration—enforced only when backed by the Union military. It’s not exactly the same as the time Michael Scott, on The Office, declared bankruptcy by simply yelling it at the top of his lungs instead of following the necessary procedure. This declaration wasn’t exactly like that; but it also was not fundamentally dissimilar.

Let’s be clear from the outset: Juneteenth is not a celebration of white benevolence, nor is it about absolution or atonement. It’s also not admission of guilt—because if it were, we’d have to start talking about reparations. And here’s the real: the conversation around reparations only becomes taboo when it’s about reparations for Black people. America has never had a problem with reparations—unless those reparations are for us.

And yet, Juneteenth remains powerful—not because of what it commemorates on paper, but because of what it represents in our memory. It is America’s first real attempt at getting Independence Day right, because that first Fourth of July—July 4th, 1776—only applied to white, land-owning males. Juneteenth tells the story that July 4th refused to hold that freedom in this country has always been partial, fragile, and contested—and that Black people have always fought to make it real.

Reparations for the Enslavers

It is a bitter and often buried truth: when the peculiar institution of African Chattel slavery was abolished, it was not the formerly enslaved who were compensated for having their spirits, souls, bodies, babies, and labor stolen. Nope. It was the very people who did the stealing that were rewarded when their stolen bounty was no longer thiers. These enslavers were receiving reparations for the chattel that was stolen from them. Black people were never compensated for the labor that was extracted from their bodies.

Following the passage of the District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act of 1862, white slaveholders in Washington, D.C. received up to $300 per freed person in federal compensation for their "loss of property." The enslaved received nothing—not land, not wages, not restitution. Just freedom in name, without the means to sustain it. We never got our 40 acres, and I’m still waiting on my mule.

This grotesque policy of rewarding enslavers for their participation in a system of racialized human trafficking and commodification was not some fringe exception—it was state-sanctioned reparation for white loss, not Black liberation. As legal historian Ariela Gross (2009) explains, “the law ensured that the end of slavery preserved the financial interests of former masters, not the futures of the freed.”

Even the so-called “Great Emancipator” Abraham Lincoln supported this program. He had signed the D.C. act into law and had also flirted with colonization plans, proposing to send formerly enslaved Black people to Central America or Africa, further proving that his primary concern was the preservation of the Union—not Black freedom (Harriot, 2023). The irony feels like an elephant on my chest. The people who profited from generations of racial terror and theft were made whole. Those who survived it were left to fend for themselves in a country that still refused to see their full humanity. If America truly wanted to reckon with its past, it would begin by acknowledging that it really doesn’t have a problem with reparations so long as said reparations are paid to white people.

Honest Abe

Abraham Lincoln, a man lionized in American mythology as the “Great Emancipator,” but who in truth was the “Great Centrist.” Lincoln did not free the slaves out of some deep moral awakening. He moved only when the economic and political pressures of war forced his hand. In fact, he once advocated for the colonization of freed Black people—because he believed, in no uncertain terms, that we were fundamentally incompatible with the nation he sought to preserve (Harriot, 2023).

Let me say this plainly: it is not a stretch to say that Black folks freed themselves. Lincoln Proclaimed a truth that our ancestor already knew. They knew that they were meant to be free peoples. They just needed the rest of the United States to affirm and recognize their radical dignity. So, they fought. Not only to find freedom, but to ensure that the freedom that they felt beckoning them, that they felt in the marrow of their bones was really real.

Juneteenth is not the story of a magnanimous president issuing a proclamation of freedom. It is the story of people—Black people—who resisted. Who ran. Who revolted. Who survived. Who, against the terror of racialized capitalism and genocidal anti-Blackness, fought for freedom. And when I say “fought,” I mean everything from Harriet Tubman’s armed raids to the subtle refusals in the Great Dismal Swamp. I mean the rebellious cadence of ring shouts and field hollers, the drumbeats that terrified enslavers from Charleston to the Caribbean. I mean the burning rage of the Stono Rebellion. I mean Duty Boukman calling down thunder from Haiti’s mountains, igniting the world’s first successful, Black-led revolution.

Lincoln Was No Liberator

Let’s kill the myth once and for all: Abraham Lincoln did not believe in Black freedom. He didn’t even believe in Black humanity. In his own words, Lincoln made it plain: “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it... my paramount objective in this struggle is to save the Union and is not either to save or destroy slavery.” That’s not abolition—that’s political strategy. And it wasn’t strategy on behalf of the enslaved. It was about saving a white nation built on white landownership and white governance and stolen Black bodies and labor.

Worse still, Lincoln told the country that he was “not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the Black and white races.” He said plainly, “I am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.” That’s not a liberator talking. That’s not what abolition sounds like. Instead, that’s a man deeply committed to the white supremacist, anti-Black hierarchy that slavery is predicated on and structured in support of. So no, Lincoln didn’t free the slaves. He didn’t even see us as fully human. But we did.

We saw our own humanity, even though this so-called “New World” tried to beat it out of us, sell it at auction, and bury it in the hold of a slave ship. We held fast to our dignity even though this new world was constantly trying to rip it away. That’s why we fought. That’s why we ran. That’s why we revolted. That’s why we sang songs that confused our captors and reminded us of who we really were. Negro spirituals weren’t just tunes; they were the sounds of the souls of Black folks obdurately signing songs of freedom in an unfree land.

As Michael Harriot writes in Black AF History, “Black people had to believe they were human when every aspect of this society told them they were not” (Harriot, 2023, p. 162). That’s the essence of Juneteenth—it’s not just a celebration of freedom granted. It’s a celebration of the belief in our own worth. A belief so strong that it led to rebellion. Resistance. Revolution. Juneteenth is not Lincoln’s legacy. It’s ours. This holiday does not celebrate a gift; rather, it is a celebration of rights earned. That is what Juneteenth celebrates. Not passivity. Not patience. Not patriotism. But Black resistance.

The Myth of Emancipation

Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation (1863) didn’t free a single enslaved person in the Confederacy—it only applied to territories in active rebellion. In other words, it was a wartime political move. Strategy. It wasn't until Union troops, under the protection of federal enforcement, made their way into Galveston, Texas on June 19, 1865—two and a half years later—that enslaved people there were formally notified that slavery had been abolished. And even then, "abolished" is a slippery term. As we know, the Thirteenth Amendment preserved slavery in the form of criminal punishment—a clause that fuels today’s Prison Industrial Complex (Alexander, 2010; Sims, 2018).

Black Freedom Was Not Given—It Was Seized.

The very fact that white enslavers kept Black people in bondage for two and a half years after they were legally “freed” tells you all you need to know about who Juneteenth is for. This day is not about Lincoln. It’s about Harriet, who carried a pistol not just to protect others—but to keep people moving toward liberation. It’s about Forest Joe and the maroons in the Great Dismal Swamp, who created fugitive communities in defiance of white dominion. It’s about Toussaint Louverture, Boukman, and the Haitian Revolution, which sent tremors of terror through slaveholding societies because it proved that Black people could not only fight—but win. It’s about my people. Your people. It’s about us.

We Still Aren’t Fully Free

The plantation just got Wi-Fi. Today’s policing system traces its roots directly to slave patrols. Our schools are still sites of exclusion. Black life is criminalized from classroom to courthouse. And yet—we rise. We fight for wholeness in a society that would rather commodify our pain than invest in our joy. As I wrote in Finding the Beautiful Path (Sims, forthcoming), Black folks are not simply surviving—we are radically becoming. And we must demand that this nation becomes, too. Better. Freer. More just. Not someday. Now.

Don’t Get it Twisted: This is a Call to Action

If you’re reading this, your part of the fight. As educators, as freedom dreamers, as those who believe in radical love—we must build spaces where students feel protected, respected, and supported. We cannot afford to be neutral. Neutrality is complicity. This is not a moment for fence-sitting. The fence itself is a weapon.

We must build sanctuaries of truth and justice in our institutions. We must teach the real history—not the sanitized version. We must name anti-Blackness when we see it. And we must refuse to let this moment pass without consequence. That’s the spirit of Juneteenth—resistance, joy, and radical becoming. Let’s embrace it, fam.

References

Alexander, M. (2010). The New Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. New Press.

Harriot, M. (2023). Black AF History: The Unwhitewashed Story of America. One World.

Sims, J. J. (2018). Revolutionary STEM Education: Critical-reality pedagogy and social justice in STEM for Black males. Peter Lang.

Sims, J. J. (Forthcoming). Finding the Beautiful Path: On Blackness, Multidimensionality, and Radical Becoming. Peter Lang.

Gross, A. (2009). What blood won’t tell: A history of race on trial in America. Harvard University Press.

United States Congress. (1862). District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act. National Archives. https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured-documents/dc-emancipation-act