Welcome to Freedom Season, America

Nothing prepares you for the mind-blowing absurdity of watching Americans argue about whether, and how, we celebrate the end of enslaving humans.

Yet that is exactly how I spent Juneteenth morning: scrolling through a revealing trail of social media comments from people who seemed to be asking one question on the surface and another one underneath it. There’s something happening here.

Somewhere between a White woman wondering if she was allowed to wish Black people “Happy Juneteenth,” an Asian woman asking whether she would be welcomed if she went to a Juneteenth festival, and Black people replying with everything from cheerful delight to exhaustion, it is apparent folks are tussling about much more than a holiday.

So here we are on this recent Juneteenth, backing-and-forthing about where we each fit in and belong in its narrative. This is how I landed on something I’m calling Freedom Season.

Welcome to Freedom Season in America: it’s the early-summer stretch that begins with Memorial Day, turns a corner on Juneteenth on June 19, and another on Independence Day on July 4. Three holidays. Three stories. One larger American conversation about sacrifice, freedom, citizenship, memory, and the unfinished work of becoming a more perfect union.

Of course, America’s civic calendar has more chapters than these three. Labor, remembrance, heritage, service, and more show up all year long. But these three early-summer dates have their own rhythm, and once I felt it, I could not unfeel it.

Americans already live inside this season. We simply have not named it yet.

We often understand our lives by naming recurring patterns. We have a holiday season, a back-to-school season, a baseball season, and an election season. Naming something doesn’t invent it; it helps us notice what has been there all along. To me, Freedom Season is one of those civic rhythms — an American tradition hiding in plain sight:

• Memorial Day asks us to remember the cost of freedom.
• Juneteenth asks us to celebrate the expansion of freedom.
• Independence Day asks us to recommit to the ideals of freedom.

Put them together, and early summer becomes more than a string of long weekends, cookouts, flags, sales, fireworks, and out-of-office replies. It becomes a civic arc.

A season, truly. Part somber reflection. Part celebratory recommitment. Freedom Season.

And if that sounds a bit too upbeat for some of you in light of our  strained civil discourse, I ask: what might be the alternative? Isn’t the end of enslaving any group of people a human enough victory for each of us to celebrate? Or must we surrender our movements and celebrations for freedom to the loudest, sourest people in the room? Long as I’ve got good Wi-Fi and a working sense of history, no, not on my watch.

Of course, I know better than
to read the comments

We all know that comment sections and social media timelines can be some dangerous, time-sucking rabbit holes.

So, of course, that’s exactly where I went on Juneteenth morning. Got to see what love, hate, and good-faith curiosity folks are offering this fine day — this day when  Union troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865, to announce and enforce the freedom President Abraham Lincoln had proclaimed more than two years earlier. Enslaved people in Texas became some of the last Americans to receive official word, and the date now stands as a defining marker of the end of legal chattel slavery in the United States.

What I find fascinating is not that people were discussing, debating, ranting, and raving over the very American history of Juneteenth, but that their thoughts are revealing something more vulnerable than ideology: So many wonder aloud whether they fit in the story of this holiday at all:

Should I say ‘Happy’ Juneteenth to the nice lady at the market? Am I welcome at the Juneteenth events? Is this a Black holiday? Why is this a holiday for all America? Is this a new thing? Why haven’t I heard of Juneteenth before now? 

Questions come from every imaginable direction and answers range from gracious to exasperated, funny to frustrated.

Some are respectfully cautious, as if they’re approaching a sacred space and don’t want to stumble in with dirty shoes. Some range from annoyed to emphatically enraged that Juneteenth is now a national holiday at all, because they perceive it as just for Black people. And some, because the internet is going to internet, are determined to turn any celebration into a grumble.

Bubbling beneath it all, however, the emotional pattern is clear: People are searching for a place to stand inside of the story of Juneteenth. That is, once they are clear what Juneteenth even is.

This observation stays with me because I spend a good deal of time studying organizational leadership and collective trust. Within this work, we see how human systems— workplaces, schools, communities, churches, families, or comment sections behaving like emergency town halls with emojis — hold so many conflicts that are not truly even about the thing folks are arguing about on the surface.

The loudest arguments are often perched haughtily atop more vulnerable questions. One of the big ones being: Where do I even belong here? That question of belonging may not seem to carry much weight, until you realize how much human behavior it explains:

• People connect with places and invest in communities where they feel seen.
• People check out emotionally and/or physically leave places where they feel invisible.
• People withdraw from systems that make them feel like tolerated guests or outsiders, instead of meaningful participants.
• People stay where they feel they matter.

Whether we call it engagement, trust, inclusion, community, morale, safety, citizenship, or culture, the human question keeps returning in different clothes: Do I have a place here?

The Tech Story: Thank God for
Good Wi-Fi and Freedom

One of the things that fascinates me most about Juneteenth is that it is not only a freedom story; it is also a communications and technology story. Stick with me here:

• President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, declaring that enslaved people held in rebellious states “are, and henceforward shall be free.”

• Juneteenth commemorates June 19, 1865, when Union Major General Gordon Granger and federal troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, and announced General Order No. 3, declaring freedom for enslaved people there.

As a tech nerd, I cannot stop thinking about this: one of the most important moments in American history is also a story about information, distribution, and enforcement. Human beings whose freedom had been declared on paper did not know it yet, and enslavers had no incentive to hurry the message along. Families, labor, movement, dignity, and self-determination remained trapped, in part, by the limits of the technology of the day.

Today, we complain when Wi-Fi buffers for seven seconds. In 1865, life-changing information could take months, years, and armed enforcement to travel and become real in the lives of people who had already been promised freedom.

We live in a world where a teen with a smartphone possesses more communication power than presidents, governors, military commanders, publishers, and business leaders held throughout most of human history. A notification can circle the globe in seconds, a livestream can reach millions, and a text message can cross continents before someone has time to rethink the punctuation.

Juneteenth reminds us that information can be liberation’s messenger, but only if it reaches the people. A freedom that never arrives in lived experience is no freedom yet at all. And yes, apparently, sometimes that route requires comments, screenshots, group chats, family debates, search engines, and somebody on the internet asking, in good faith, whether they are allowed to say Happy Juneteenth without being weird.

America’s Moral Inheritance

We could stop at the familiar explanation that celebrating one community’s freedom story does not take anything away from anyone else. That is true enough, but it is neither the whole truth nor the full invitation Juneteenth extends.

The deeper, broader point is this: when freedom expands for the people a nation once excluded, the moral inheritance of the whole nation changes.

That Juneteenth rises from the liberation of enslaved Black Americans specifically does not narrow its significance; it widens this liberation’s relevance for each one of us. The expansion of freedom that June 19, 1865, represents bestowed a moral inheritance upon the nation—one that continues to benefit citizens and immigrants alike. And despite our recurring neglect to fully steward that inheritance,

it continues to strengthen the institutions, opportunities, and communities we all share.

To be clear, these observations do not flatten Black Americans into background scenery in this group’s own liberation story. Enslaved Black people fought, resisted, survived, organized, worshipped, created, hoped, and persevered. This role is central, irreplaceable, and sacred.

At the same time, the liberation story also includes people of all ethnicities and socioeconomic backgrounds who chose to carry the message: courageous abolitionists, Union soldiers, clergy, lawmakers, and teachers, among others.

These facts do not compete; they complete the picture. Remembering slavery does not mean any living Americans today are personally guilty of slavery. It means we are honest enough to inherit the whole history: cruelty and courage, oppression and resistance, delay and deliverance.

That is why Juneteenth becomes larger when more people of all backgrounds understand their own connections to liberation and to the Freedom Season arc.

The Freedom Season Arc

For all these reasons, these three holidays — Memorial Day, Juneteenth, and Independence Day — tell a uniquely American story. Not a perfect story. Not a simple story. But a remarkable one:

• Memorial Day calls us to remember freedom has always had a cost, and that a nation that forgets those who perish on its behalf becomes spiritually careless.

• Juneteenth rings in the middle of this season like a bell. It rings with joy for emancipation from legal chattel slavery. It rings with lamentation for freedom delayed. It rings with invitation for America to celebrate the news of freedom finally reaching all of those for whom the message is meant on June 19, 1865.

• Independence Day teems with merriment, fireworks, flag-waving contradictions and all, commemorating the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. Adopted on July 4, 1776, by the Second Continental Congress, the Declaration of Independence articulated extraordinary ideals in a nation that had not yet extended those ideals to everyone. The present-day celebration of Juneteenth leading up to the Fourth of July empowers America to honor the ideals of our Declaration of Independence more completely and to more honestly pursue the “more perfect Union” the U.S. Constitution later names.

We already see Freedom Season in our cookouts, parades, classrooms, festivals, veterans’ ceremonies, new Americans embracing civic traditions and more. The train is moving. Some folks may stay stuck on the platform, scowling at hope and celebration like a good time stole their parking space. Let them. We move forward: honoring those who died in service, celebrating those whose freedom was delayed but not denied forever, and re-declaring our liberty.

And what a tremendous honor it is that We the People get to keep carrying that message forward with faster tools and more ways to connect than our folks had in 1865.

Welcome to Freedom Season, America. 

The good message keeps moving, as long as we keep doing the good work.