Juneteenth Comes North
If you close your eyes, you can hear it before you see it: the cackle of uncles fighting over dominoes, grills snapping with brisket, Al Green sliding from the radio, the slap of a hand game under a sun hotter than two squirrels making love in a wool sock beside a toaster. Where I’m from, Juneteenth was our second Christmas—a day so thick with ritual and story that you could taste the history in every plate passed across the folding table.
When I landed in Chicago in November 2022, Juneteenth had already gone national. The billboards were up, the hashtags were rolling, and the country had adopted a holiday that, for generations, had belonged mostly to Black Texans. But outside of that circle, few people truly know the history—fewer still understand the weight, or why preserving the spirit of Juneteenth matters now more than ever.
The Long Road to Freedom: Galveston, Delay, and Deliverance
History books make it sound clean. January 1, 1863—Lincoln’s pen, the Emancipation Proclamation, and Black people waking up free. The reality? In Texas, the news moved slow. Planters kept working the land, enslaved folks kept picking cotton, and word of freedom died out in the mouth before it reached the fields.
It took two and a half years for the truth to cross Texas. On June 19, 1865, Union General Gordon Granger stepped onto Galveston’s hot sand with two thousand troops and read General Order No. 3: “All slaves are free.”
But those words didn’t erase chains overnight. Freedom in Texas came as rumor, suspicion, sometimes at the barrel of a gun. Many enslaved people walked off plantations that day, but many more were hunted, beaten, and even killed for daring to claim it. The joy of Juneteenth was born alongside the grief for those who never made it to the party.
That’s what we commemorate—a freedom hard-earned, delayed, and, for too many, denied. The first Juneteenth gatherings in 1866 were as much about survival as celebration: people dressing up, sharing food, reading the Emancipation aloud because they knew nobody else would do it for them. It was a declaration of existence, a way to mark time and say, “We are still here,” even as the world tried to erase them.
Texas Traditions, Resistance, and Black Genius
Growing up, you couldn’t separate Juneteenth from resistance. In Houston’s Emancipation Park, in the tight streets of Dallas’s Oak Cliff, in East Texas towns you’ll never see on a tourist map—every Juneteenth was protest and praise at once. Red drinks (Kool-Aid, Big Red, strawberry soda) nodded to West African rituals and the blood lost along the road to freedom. Barbecue smoke, old church songs, and the recitation of General Order No. 3—every ritual a shield against forgetting.
Texas was stubborn. It became the first state to make Juneteenth an official holiday in 1980. For decades, while America debated if Martin Luther King deserved a day, Black Texans held the line—organizing, teaching, making sure their children understood exactly what had been lost and found on that June day. They built Emancipation Parks, hosted parades, and turned backyards into sanctuaries of memory. The holiday became a living archive, passed down in stories, recipes, and the rhythm of drums.
The Migration North: Juneteenth Finds Chicago
As Black Texans packed up their dreams in cardboard suitcases and followed railroad lines north—chasing jobs in Pullman car factories, seeking shelter from Southern night riders—Juneteenth came too.
In Chicago, the earliest celebrations were mostly for transplanted Texans. Maybe you’d catch the scent of smoked turkey legs at a South Side block party, or hear an elder telling the story in a back room at Quinn Chapel. Over time, though, the roots grew out, twining with the Great Migration’s other stories. Juneteenth became not just a memory of Texas but a claim for all Black Chicagoans: a day to declare, in a city still segregated by red lines and patrol cars, that our freedom was not up for negotiation.
Chicago’s Juneteenth is shaped by the city’s own history of struggle. The Great Migration brought more than a million Black Southerners north, seeking not just jobs but dignity. In neighborhoods like Bronzeville and Lawndale, Juneteenth became a way to honor both where you came from and where you landed. Each year, the celebration grew, weaving together Texas roots and Chicago reality, until Juneteenth belonged to the city as much as to the South.
Juneteenth Goes National: The Cost of the Spotlight
In June 2021, after decades of grassroots organizing—led by elders like Opal Lee—President Biden signed legislation making Juneteenth a federal holiday. By the time I arrived in Chicago, Juneteenth was officially recognized in all 50 states. Suddenly, every news anchor and mayor in America was talking about “absolute equality.”
It’s tempting to see that as a win. But here’s the thing about progress in America: it’s always served with a side of amnesia. As the ink dried, so did the authenticity. We watched the same lawmakers who wouldn’t vote for voting rights don kente cloth and kneel for the cameras. Corporations plastered Juneteenth on product labels, rolling out themed ice cream and T-shirts—but not changing a damn thing about pay equity, board seats, or who’s first to be fired.
That’s when James Baldwin’s words cut through the noise:
“What is it you wanted me to reconcile myself to? I was born here almost 60 years ago, I’m not gonna live another 60 years.
You always told me it takes time.
It’s taken my father’s time, my mother’s time. My uncle’s time. My brother’s and my sister’s time.
My nieces’ and my nephews’ time.
How much time do you want? For your progress.”
We measure the delay in generations, not just years. For every symbolic victory, there’s a ledger of what’s been lost: wages, land, health, hope. The cost of the spotlight is real. When a holiday goes mainstream, it risks losing its roots. The danger is that Juneteenth becomes just another day off, stripped of its history, its urgency, its call to action.
Juneteenth Is Not a Victory Lap
Some folks want to turn Juneteenth into Black July 4th—one big cookout, a ribbon of red, white, and blue. But to me, and to a lot of people I know, it’s not that simple.
Juneteenth is both a celebration and a challenge. It’s a line in the sand: we honor the day because it was stolen from us for so long, because emancipation never arrived all at once, because freedom has always been patchwork and conditional.
Historian Erin Stewart Mauldin put it plain: “The end of the Civil War and the ending of slavery didn’t happen overnight and was a lot more like a jagged edge than a clean cut.” Even after June 19, Black Texans faced night riders, crooked sheriffs, and a new kind of peonage called sharecropping. The war for “absolute equality” just changed uniforms.
Juneteenth is not just a party—it’s a reckoning. It’s a day to remember that freedom was not handed down; it was fought for, inch by inch, and it is still being fought for today. The holiday is a mirror, reflecting both how far we’ve come and how far we have to go.
The Chicago Struggle: Where Juneteenth Meets Now
If you walk through Washington Park or Douglass Park this June, you’ll see what’s left of the old and the birth of the new: barbecue, drum circles, dance crews, organizers pushing voter registration, Black-owned businesses with tables stacked high.
But there’s tension in the air. Juneteenth has gone corporate—so have parts of Pride Month. City politicians will pose for photos at both, but Black trans women in Chicago still face the highest rates of violence. The city closes schools in Black neighborhoods, but flies the Juneteenth flag at City Hall.
In these moments, Baldwin’s question echoes again:
"How much time do you want?
We are tired of waiting. We want justice to come on time—not as a consolation prize."
Chicago’s Juneteenth is a microcosm of the national struggle. It’s a city where celebration and protest walk hand in hand, where every parade is also a march for justice. The fight for Black lives is not just about the past; it’s about the present. Juneteenth in Chicago is a call to action, a reminder that the work isn’t done—not by a long shot.
Two Struggles, Shared Liberation
It’s no coincidence that Juneteenth and Pride share the same month. Black queer people have always stood on freedom’s front lines—Bayard Rustin strategizing the March on Washington, Marsha P. Johnson throwing the first brick at Stonewall, and so many unnamed others holding it down at every intersection of identity.
True liberation has never been singular. In Chicago, Juneteenth and Pride aren’t just anniversaries on a calendar—they’re twin testaments to unfinished business, a reminder that none of us are free until all of us are. This city’s celebration should never be reduced to rainbow flags and hashtags, but recognized for what it is: a call to action that demands equity, safety, and dignity from every corner where Blackness and queerness meet.
The intersection of Juneteenth and Pride is more than symbolic. It is a living, breathing example of what solidarity looks like. It’s about recognizing that the struggle for Black freedom and the fight for LGBTQ+ rights are deeply connected. Both are about demanding to be seen, to be valued, to be free. In Chicago, these movements overlap, support each other, and remind us that justice is not a zero-sum game. The liberation of one is tied to the liberation of all.
How We Keep Juneteenth Ours
So how do we keep the meaning from slipping away?
- We center Black voices—those who hold our history, those pushing for change, and those just beginning to write their own stories.
- We teach the unvarnished history—not just the parades, but the lynchings, the labor, the red lining.
- We fight for the living, tying Juneteenth to the fights that matter: policing, housing, health, schools.
- We buy Black, build Black, back each other—all year.
- We honor the rituals: the food, the music, and the undeniable beauty of our ongoing existence.
We create new traditions, ones that speak to today’s struggles. We make space for joy, for healing, for remembering—and for dreaming of a better future.
A Place for Doubt, and for Hope
Sometimes, in the quiet after the music fades and the last plate is cleared, I find myself wondering if true freedom is even possible. The weight of history presses down—centuries of promises broken, rights delayed, and justice rationed out in small, hard-won increments. Some days, it’s hard not to feel that liberation is always just out of reach, a horizon that keeps moving no matter how far we walk.
Maybe that’s too heavy a thought to bring to a celebration. But Juneteenth itself is heavy—it was born from a freedom delayed, a promise that arrived late and incomplete. To pretend otherwise would be to miss the point. The power of Juneteenth isn’t just in the joy, but in the honesty: the courage to celebrate while still acknowledging how much remains undone.
And yet, maybe that’s why we keep gathering, year after year. The act of coming together—telling the truth, remembering, refusing to let the story end—becomes its own form of freedom. Maybe hope isn’t believing that liberation is inevitable, but choosing to carry on, even when the road is long. In that tension—between what’s promised and what’s possible—we find the strength to keep moving forward.
The Work Isn’t Done—Not in Texas, Not in Chicago
Juneteenth is a bridge stretching from the unfinished business of emancipation to the struggles still shaping Black life today. In Chicago, it carries all its original weight and more: a measure of what has and hasn’t changed, and a reminder that history isn’t just behind us, but beneath our feet.
As celebrations move from block parties to city halls, Juneteenth’s meaning risks being blurred—folded into the calendar as if freedom’s promise were fulfilled. But across this city, the legacy endures in our gatherings, stories, organizing, and the call to hold the nation accountable.
This bridge doesn’t belong to performative politics or corporate branding. It belongs to those who know the story isn’t over until justice is lived, not just promised, for everyone.