In a couple of weeks, the country will celebrate Independence Day - the commemoration of freedom from British rule. Today, however, marks the worldwide celebration of another Independence Day, "Juneteenth". It commemorates the Emancipation Proclamation of 1862 and the nearly 3 year delayed notification to many former slaves that they were, in fact, free. It was a time when rebellious slave holders relocated their operations to more remote parts of the country, including the Southwest, so they could continue to practice slavery illegally. Tomorrow, a group of students and faculty at Northern Arizona University will host a Juneteenth celebration, and in this audio postcard they share with us what freedom means to them.
Van Samuel Diggs, sophomore at NAU
What freedom means to me is that everyone has equal opportunity to do what they believe, to do what they want to do. We all want to be equal. We all want to live our lives the way we want to live. We don't need to be oppressed or marginalized.
I'm involved in the Juneteenth celebration because this is very important to my heritage. Within my own family we've done extensive research and found out we had slave masters, and from generation to generation, we still feel this burden. We came from being other people's property to one man in the White House being President.
Tylor Brown, sophomore at NAU
In the context of Juneteenth, freedom means to me the ability of my people as Africa-Americans to be able to have equality for us and move forward in different progressions within life; to do what we weren't able to do before which is, ultimately, vote. That's freedom to me, being able to ultimately own a business, own land, to raise our own children, for a parent to be able to call a child theirs. That's freedom, which is really a basic human right, but it's also freedom for the African-Americans.
My great-grandmother who is still alive to this day, God bless her, she didn't get to see the horrors of slavery, but she was a sharecropper which is the first generation out of slavery. I've heard many different stories that she's told me. She still maintained straight A's going to school once a week which is very powerful, you know? Working on tobacco plants, tobacco leaves...so, yeah, my family does have that history, and we still have the land in North Carolina that we were, they were on.
Dr. Frederick Gooding, Jr., Ethnic Studies Professor at NAU
What freedom means to me is the ability to emote, express, and move as one truly desires. I think, in essence, that is what American democracy allows for...in theory, that is. And so what we saw in practice was this type of lack of hindrance of movement, and motions, and feelings were limited to a certain demographic. And so I think that - when I think of freedom, when I think of Juneteenth - I think of a larger group of people, a larger community being able to negotiate these open spaces in a manner that is safe and equitable for all. And so, I think freedom is a concept that we're still working on. I don't think it's something that is perfect. I don't think it's something we can say we have achieved, but I think it's a work in progress, and I think when we look at the past we can be encouraged as to where we still need to go.
In addition to African-Americans physically being free, I think that many of our white brothers and sisters were, perhaps, emotionally and spiritually freed from this burden of believing that there were other humans who were beneath them. We often don't see the ramifications and effects, but these are very damaging thoughts, this idea that you're inherently superior than somebody else. It's very damaging for the larger community and society at large. So, in many ways Juneteenth is an opportunity for whites to also partake in this larger idea that WE, as a larger body, made one concrete step closer to the concept of freedom.
