The Fine Print

​First off:

They want us arguing about statues, UFC fights on the White House lawn, and President Trump’s beefing with media personalities while they steal from us. 

They want us outraged at Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s performative bravado or Vice President J.D. Vance’s casual racism toward immigrants as House Speaker Mike Johnson admits on record that the GOP plans to gut Social Security and Medicaid—programs which disproportionately serve the young, the elderly, and minorities. 

They want us so overwhelmed by the volume of it all that we forget who’s making your grocery bill go up, who just voted for Congress to give $70 billion to ICE, and who’s re-writing our history right in front of our faces. 

This is not new. This is the oldest play in the book: keeping our minds chasing everything but the problems right before our eyes.

Don't take the bait. Don't get comfortable. And don’t be silent.

Juneteenth and the dream deferred
By Khari Thompson

Nearly 100 years after formerly enslaved people in Galveston, Texas celebrated the first “Jubilee Day”—the holiday that would eventually become Juneteenth—Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. sat in a Birmingham jail cell waiting for freedom, having been arrested for protesting segregation in Birmingham in April of 1963.

And as he waited, he wrote to several Alabama clergymen who disagreed with his methods of non-violent protest, who urged him and those that followed him to wait a little longer for the world to be ready for desegregation.

“When you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tip-toe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of ‘nobodiness’—then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait,” he said then. 

Those enslaved people in Galveston—and everywhere else in the South—had to wait more than two years from the time Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, which ceremonially (but not actually) freed them from bondage, to actually celebrate their freedom properly. Had the Union not won the war, who knows how long that wait would’ve continued?

After that, the formerly enslaved and their children had to wait for Reconstruction and the constitutional amendments that came with it to legally enjoy the rights of American citizens and partake in democracy—something they did even while enduring violence and persecution from their former enslavers. 

Then, when Reconstruction failed, they and their descendants had to wait decades more—surviving under Jim Crow’s thumb—before King and multitudes of others ushered in civil rights legislation, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, that finally offered the promise of true citizenship in this American experiment.

A Juneteenth parade and celebration in Wright Cuney Park in Galveston, Texas on June 19, 2025. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

And today, nearly 120 years after the first Juneteenth celebration, 63 years after King sat in that cell, we’re still waiting for a future, a democracy, that may never come. One that gets wrenched from our grasp every time we think we’re on the cusp of achieving it, from the dismantling of Reconstruction to rollbacks of Civil Rights legislation to the 2020 racial reckoning that feels like a memory just six years later.

But there’s something important we must remember as we reflect on Juneteenth in this moment.

Juneteenth is no happily-ever-after holiday. Like the end of the Civil War and Reconstruction, the event it memorializes did not bring the peace and prosperity for all that was promised. It did not yield the full participation and citizenship that America’s promissory note spells out in its Constitution. It did not end racism or heal all that divides us.

But that’s not why we celebrate it.

We remember Juneteenth, a holiday many of our ancestors dared to celebrate with joy even in the midst of backlash and violence, because memory and joy are their own forms of resistance. Remembering how far we’ve come gives us strength even as we think of how far we have yet to go. Holding space for joy helps us push on in the face of fear and doubt.

And we remember, also, that Juneteenth is not just a holiday for Black Americans and the descendants of enslaved people. It’s one that all of us should celebrate together—a reminder that reveling in others’ liberation brings us all closer.

So when we meet this weekend at Boston’s Franklin Park, or wherever you are, to celebrate Juneteenth, with music, food, and beautiful company, let’s hold the entirety of this holiday in our hearts.

The gratitude for how far we’ve come. The clear resolve on where we need to go. And, most of all, the joy of being in this moment together.

Yes, we’re still waiting for justice. But these moments of memory and joyful resistance are part of the fight.