A conference room in the Cuyahoga County, Ohio, Administrative Headquarters overlooks one of County Councilwoman Meredith Turner’s most prized views in downtown Cleveland. Through sparkling glass panes, she sees the Terminal Tower and the Progressive Field that houses Cleveland’s professional baseball team, the southbound lanes of Interstate 77 toward Akron beyond that, and just a little farther out, the remnants of a once-thriving steel industry where her late mother worked for close to four decades before her passing in 2021.
“I love to take meetings in that conference room because it reminds me of how far we’ve come, the sacrifices that my mother made in that steel mill every day to provide an opportunity for home ownership, to provide opportunities for education,” Turner told Salon, reflecting on the shoulders she’s stood on to become a first-generation college graduate and councilwoman.
“Juneteenth — what it means for me is that I’m my ancestors’ wildest dreams,” she said, pointing to her elected office. “It was the dreams of everyone that came before me. It was my grandmother’s dream. Maybe it was my mother’s dream. Maybe it was the hopes and aspirations [Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones] had for me. That’s what it means to me: the freedom to live out my life.”
This Juneteenth is the fifth since lawmakers voted to federally recognize the Southern holiday commemorating Black Texans’ freedom in 2021. In spite of the Trump administration moving to defund federal diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, attempting to hide and deny history across the country, and continuing to antagonize civil rights — alongside the Supreme Court gutting the Voting Rights Act — many Black people see this year’s Juneteenth as both a signal to recommit to resistance and a symbol of how important it is to celebrate Black history and culture.
”The importance of Juneteenth doesn’t rise or fall based on who occupies the White House,” Turner said, underscoring Juneteenth as an American story. “Administrations change, but history does not. If anything, the moment of political division that we’re in now reminds us why understanding our history matters more than ever.”
For Ian Haddock, Juneteenth had been tradition long before the federal government chose to recognize it. Haddock, the founder and executive director of the Normal Anomaly Initiative, a Black LGBTQ+ organization, was born and raised in Galveston County, Texas, not far from the coastal city where Union troops announced that the more than 250,000 enslaved African Americans in Texas had been freed, two years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.
“Juneteenth — what it means for me is that I’m my ancestors’ wildest dreams”
Haddock told Salon that he grew up celebrating Juneteenth as a sort of church day, communing with his family and community. Only after he left Galveston did he begin to appreciate the holiday for the legacies of resistance and resilience it represented. Now, as Trump administration policies and anti-LGBTQ state legislation threaten his identities as a Black queer man, he values Juneteenth more than ever.
“To think about Juneteenth, while celebrating Pride Month — that is the most beautiful intersection. Black people are the curators of culture, from hair and fashion, from pop culture to food,” he said, adding that the holiday also presents a call for unity for Black people across all their intersecting identities.
(Photo by Nathan Howard/Getty Images) An attendee adjusts his Juneteenth-themed hat during a neighborhood Juneteenth festival on June 17, 2023 in Washington, DC.
“Though there is still work to do this month, it’s a reminder that we are worthy and worth it, that this energy is necessary,” Haddock said. “If there’s anything that I can pull from this dismal gray moment in history, it’s the hope that, for our culture and our celebrations, this revives us.”
Juneteenth lives in the DNA of Black Americans, Dr. Marcus Anthony Hunter, a UCLA sociologist and the coiner of #BlackLivesMatter, told Salon, referencing rapper Kendrick Lamar. As such, he argues that the government’s explicit and intentional efforts to erase or rewrite Black history can only ever be attempts to distort, distract and convince the public that Black Americans have not experienced the systemic racism and violence that they have. The Trump administration giving credence to and expanding such efforts via executive orders and legal opinions threatening national monuments serves to separate more people from the “Black experience in America” they’re currently encountering under President Donald Trump.
“The police don’t believe you. You’re getting roughed up. You’re taking time off from your work as a medical professional, and you get shot in the streets. There’s still no justice for you. There are people just showing up en masse, busting up in churches and other places, and dragging people out and taking them into things, giving fugitive slave laws,” Hunter said. “That is the America that a certain population is very aware of, and we’re often told we can’t talk about it. We debate amongst ourselves if we should even still be discussing it. Then there’s a whole infrastructure of information technology that is hoping that we never confront America publicly with unity about the fact of our very genealogy in this narrative.”
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Glenn Harris, the president of racial justice organization Race Forward, told Salon that he views this year’s Juneteenth through a complicated lens. In this moment, he said, he simultaneously holds the truth of celebration and pride alongside the grief and urgency of the political climate, recognizing that the current backlash is “a historic pattern.”
“Every time Black folks have moved us towards greater freedom and democracy, every time Black and brown folks have moved towards having more power, there are always forces that push us back,” Harris said. “Juneteenth is this reminder that delay is not the same thing as defeat, that our people have survived systems built to erase us, and still we imagine freedom. Still, we organize. Still, we built movements that fundamentally have made this country more democratic, not just for us, but for everyone.”
And many Black Americans are still fighting to preserve the civil rights gains that are left. Turner said she’s readying to pull back the curtain on the organizing she’s been doing as a councilwoman, a member of the greater Cleveland chapter of the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. and a contributor to the national sorority’s social action commission.
State Rep. Angie Nixon, D-Fla., who is running for U.S. Senate, made headlines in May for her intentional disruption to slow down a Florida House vote on a congressional map that would politically gerrymander the state. As her fellow lawmakers cast the last votes to pass the map, Nixon yelled into a hot pink megaphone, accusing her fellow lawmakers of violating the state constitution.
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She told Salon that what motivated her action that day, which coincided with the Supreme Court’s release of the Louisiana v. Callais decision concerning the Voting Rights Act, was her concern for how quickly and decisively Republican legislators were willing to diminish Black Floridians’ voting power. Hearing state Rep. Yvonne Hayes Hinson, D, describe the horrors she faced while fighting for the right to vote during the Civil Rights Movement on the House floor in 2022 also propelled her action.
“Just knowing that she’s having to deal with this again — we have to speak up. I’m agitating us older millennials, especially because the baby boomers and Generation X, they’ve been in this fight for a while, and now it’s time for us to take this mantle and to do more,” said Nixon, who was also arrested in May for staging a five-hour sit-in outside Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ office.
For her, Juneteenth is an opportunity to rally others to resist efforts to roll back their freedoms. As a Southerner who grew up in the church, it also reminds her of a phrase she came up hearing: “Don’t let the devil steal your joy.”
“As we continue to fight, we got to find joy regardless,” she said, recalling stories of how her enslaved ancestors would toil until they could dance, sing and connect with their loved ones on their rare days of rest. “Experiencing joy amongst each other in our community, right now in this country, it’s resistance in and of itself.”
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