On June 19, 1964, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was approved after surviving an 83-day filibuster in the United States Senate. Ninety-nine years earlier, on June 19, 1865, we celebrated the first African-American Emancipation Day, the oldest nationally celebrated commemoration of the ending of slavery in the United States… Let us celebrate on this bittersweet day, made the sweeter with Juneteenth now being a federal holiday beginning in 2021, with the words of President Obama back on June 19. 2016…

“Just outside the Oval Office hangs a painting depicting the night of December 31, 1862. In it, African-American men, women, and children crowd around a single pocket watch, waiting for the clock to strike midnight and the Emancipation Proclamation to take effect. As the slaves huddle anxiously in the dimly lit room, we can sense how even two more minutes seems like an eternity to wait for one’s freedom. But the slaves of Galveston, Texas, had to wait more than two years after Lincoln’s decree and two months after Appomattox to receive word that they were free at last.

Today we commemorate the anniversary of that delayed but welcome news. Decades of collective action would follow as equality and justice for African-Americans advanced slowly, frustratingly, gradually, on our nation’s journey toward a more perfect union. On this Juneteenth, we remember that struggle as we reflect on how far we’ve come as a country. The slaves of Galveston knew their freedom was only a first step, just as the bloodied foot soldiers who crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge 100 years later knew they had to keep marching.

Juneteenth is a time to recommit ourselves to the work that remains undone. We remember that even in the darkest hours, there is cause to hope for tomorrow’s light. Today, no matter our race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation, we recommit ourselves to working to free modern-day slaves around the world and to honoring in our own time the efforts of those who fought so hard to steer our country truer to our highest ideals.”

here we stand in this moment of eternity, a mere six years later but it feels light years away as we witness and participate in the rising tide demanding that America be the land of the free, demanding that justice for all be the law of the land, demanding that we start funding life re-membering we belong to each other rather than living under the delusion that we are separate leading to funding death and destruction and domination…

i woke up this morning intent on taking former President Obama at his word with this old spiritual singing me… “woke up this morning with my mind on freedom”… grateful to be spending this day with a communion of beings who have devoted decades and decades to bending the arc of the moral universe towards justice and feeling we are witnessing a baby step in the bending toward being beloved community…

may we all wake up each moment with our mind on freedom for all, speaking truth to power and raising hell until we walk the talk of life, liberty and justice for all relatives…

“Lift every voice and sing   
Till earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the listening skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us.   
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on till victory is won.”

~ James Weldon Johnson ~