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 part of Juneteenth: 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 buoyant generosity to exhaustion, it is apparent folks are tussling about much more than a holiday.
On this recent Juneteenth morning, we are 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 neighbors 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:
• 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 journalists know that the comments section of almost anywhere on the internet and social media timelines in general can be some dangerous places.
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, to announce and enforce the freedom President Abraham Lincoln had proclaimed more than two years earlier in 1863. On June 19, 1865, enslaved people in Texas became some of the last Americans to receive official word and enforcement of emancipation. The date now stands as one of the defining markers of the end of chattel slavery in the United States, and one of the most important dates in American history and in the African American experience.
What I find fascinating is not that people were discussing, debating, ranting, and raving over the 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 exhausted, funny to frustrated.
Some people express relief to hear that yes, they can celebrate, and those answering are largely welcoming and glad people want to celebrate together. 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. When we study human systems — workplaces, schools, communities, churches, families, or comment sections behaving like emergency town halls with emojis — we notice more readily that many arguments are not actually about the thing people are arguing about on the surface.
Sometimes the loudest arguments are perched haughtily atop more vulnerable questions. One of the big ones being: Where do I even belong here? The question of belonging may not seem to carry much weight until you realize how much human behavior it explains:
• People stay with organizations where they feel they matter.
• People leave places where they feel invisible.
• People invest in communities where they feel seen.
• People withdraw from systems that make them feel like tolerated guests instead of meaningful participants.
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?
That question was all over the Juneteenth threads. It appeared in the cautious comments, the defensive comments, the joyful comments, the curious comments, and even in some of the irritated ones. People are not simply asking how to observe a holiday. They are seemingly asking whether this freedom celebration is a party they are welcome to attend.
Wild ways of asking, notwithstanding, the essential question is worth a reasonable reply.
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.
Look, folks, 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 technological limitations. The message and enforcement had not yet reached the people who needed it most.
This distinction should stop us in our tracks, especially now, when so much of modern life is built around instant communication. 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 teenager with a smartphone possesses more communication power than presidents, governors, military commanders, publishers, and business leaders held throughout most of human history. Today, 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.
Black American Liberation and
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. Juneteenth rises from the liberation of enslaved Black Americans. That specificity is not a limitation.
Every American — and every person around the globe who cherishes freedom and human rights — has a stake in celebrating the end of chattel slavery in the United States. And no, the story does not belong to everyone in the same way. The defeat of slavery, however, enlarges the moral imagination and obligation to steward democracy with honesty, public accountability, and civic care.
This does not flatten Black Americans into background scenery in our own liberation story. Enslaved Black people fought, resisted, survived, organized, worshipped, created, hoped, and persevered. Their 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: brave abolitionists, Union soldiers, clergy, lawmakers, and teachers, among others. These facts do not compete; they complete the picture. Remembering slavery does not mean 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 understand their own connections to liberation and to the Freedom Season arc.
A Freedom Story Arc:
Independence Day Ideals
The Freedom Season arc moves from Memorial Day to Juneteenth to Independence Day: remembering freedom’s cost, celebrating freedom’s arrival where it had been delayed, and recommitting to freedom’s ideals. Together, these holidays tell a uniquely American story. Not a perfect story. Not a simple story. But a remarkable one.
Memorial Day asks 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 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.
Then comes Independence Day, flag-waving fireworks, 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.
For many Black Americans in particular, it is an ever-present fact that in 1776, people who looked like us were largely enslaved in the United States.
Celebrating Juneteenth in the days leading up to the Fourth of July, therefore, empowers America to honor the ideals of our Declaration of Independence more completely, and to wrestle more honestly with the “more perfect Union” the U.S. Constitution later names.
Freedom Season is already visible in the calendar: cookouts, parades, classrooms, posts, festivals, veterans’ ceremonies, family conversations, immigrants learning new civic traditions, and friends around the world rooting for America to get its act together. The train is moving. Some people may stay on the platform, scowling at joy like it personally stole their parking space. Let them. The train is still moving.
So we honor those who died in service. We celebrate those whose freedom was delayed but not denied forever. We declare again that liberty is a living thing: not a sentence sealed under glass, not a firework that disappears in a cloud of smoke until next year’s show. Liberty is carried, taught, corrected, defended, and celebrated by imperfect people making that extraordinary language meet our nation’s highest good every day.
And what a tremendous honor it is that We the People get to keep carrying that message forward with faster tools than our ancestors had and more ways to connect.
Welcome to Freedom Season, America.
The message is still moving, but only if we keep doing the good work.
