Three years ago, I sat down with Joe Conway, who was, at the time, the City of Wilmington’s Chief Equity and Inclusion Officer — and a WHQR Board member. We talked about Juneteenth, which had, for the first time, become a City of Wilmington holiday, two years after then-President Joe Biden made it a federal holiday in 2021.
The holiday celebrates the day — June 19th, 1865 — when the U.S. Army delivered the news to enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, that they were free. It was, notably, two and a half years after Lincoln gave the Emancipation Proclamation. It’s seen by historians as effectively the end of slavery in the Confederacy.
Juneteenth, also called Freedom Day, has been celebrated in parts of the Black community for a long time, but it wasn't widely known. In 2023, it was still gaining traction, and you would still routinely bump into people who had just heard about Juneteenth — or hadn’t heard about it yet, at all.
Three years later, I wanted to talk about how the resonance and symbolism of Juneteenth has — or hasn’t — sunken in. I also wanted to talk about how Juneteenth, as a federal holiday that was becoming more widely understood and celebrated, came out of a particular cultural moment where the nation and its institutions were reflecting on, and in many cases reexamining, the past. Our current moment, just a few years later, well, it looks a little different.
Joe, who’s now the director of community health and engagement at UNC Health, was good enough to come back into the studio, and revisit our conversation about Juneteenth, which is, of course, also about identity, and history, and the relationships between the two.
Links:
