Healing as Freedom, Freedom as Healing: Lineages of Emancipation toward Wholeness

Juneteenth is a significant date in US history and in the experience of Americans of African descent. And the lessons its story teaches us about connecting African American thoughts about freedom and emancipation to the same notions across the African diaspora and throughout history can and should echo throughout the year.

So Racial Justice Ministries and Join the Movement toward Racial Justice invite you to continue honoring and celebrating Juneteenth by engaging the recording of our 2024 celebration, remembering and discovering the healing practices that sustained freedom in the bones of our ancestors of African descent, before and after emancipation. Through music and prayer, poetry and art, reflection and ritual, may we find a medicine bundle, a poultice, a libation, a Brush Harbor and a clearing, that teaches us the sound of freedom, echoing from legacies of healing and singing futures of wholeness all year round.

This celebration was originally recorded on June 20, 2024.

And continue your learning journey:

Toolkits and Videos: 

• Juneteenth | National Museum of African American History and Culture
• Juneteenth: Faith & Freedom | A Documentary from @ourdailybread Voices Collection
• Henry Louis Gates Jr. on the significance and history of Juneteenth

Reading Resources: 

• Annette Gordon-Reed on Texas history and growing up there in the ’60s and ’70s. Her new book, ‘On Juneteenth,’ explores the complexities of the past and how we think of them.

Healing Stories for Nurture and Self-Care

• The Black Joy Project A Literary and Visual Love Letter to How We Thrive Kleaver Cruz gifts readers with an historic site and cultural center in Central Brooklyn that uses education, arts, and a social justice lens to preserve, document and inspire engagement with the history of Weeksville, one of the largest free Black communities in pre-Civil War America.
• Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barnes Sacred Self-Care Daily Practices for Nurturing Our Whole Selves
• Cole Arthur Riley Black Liturgies Prayers Poems and Meditations for Staying Human
• Healing Justice Lineages: Dreaming at the Crossroads of Liberation, Collective Care, and Safety by Cara Page and Erica Woodland

Memories of Freedom Liberation and Justice in Song and Storytelling

• Ella’s Song – Resistance Revival Chorus
• Ysaye Barnwell – Wanting Memories
• Rhiannon Giddens featuring Yo-Yo Ma – “Build A House”
• “Stand Up” – Official Lyric Video – Performed by Cynthia Erivo

The Life of Juneteenth Advocate Opal Lee

• The History of Opal Lee and Juneteenth
• Opal Lee: Meet the “Grandmother of Juneteenth”
• Opal Lee and What it Means to be Free 🖋️ A Kids Read Aloud Story about Juneteenth and Freedom!

Historical Resources

• Africa’s Great Civilizations | Interview with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. | PBS

“On “Freedom’s Eve,” or the eve of January 1, 1863, the first Watch Night services took place. On that night, enslaved and free African Americans gathered in churches and private homes all across the country awaiting news that the Emancipation Proclamation had taken effect. At the stroke of midnight, prayers were answered as all enslaved people in Confederate States were declared legally free. Union soldiers, many of whom were black, marched onto plantations and across cities in the south reading small copies of the Emancipation Proclamation spreading the news of freedom in Confederate States. Only through the Thirteenth Amendment did emancipation end slavery throughout the United States.”