History tells us that enslaved people legally became free on January 1, 1863, with President Abraham Lincoln signing the Emancipation Proclamation. In reality, true freedom came years later for countless enslaved African Americans. Despite the law, Confederate states remained defiant, continuing their brutal practice until Union troops could enforce the law in the Deep South. On June 19, 1865, Union General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston Bay, Texas, and declared:
The people of Texas are informed that in accordance with a Proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired laborer.
Since then, the day has become known as Juneteenth, a time to commemorate the strength, freedom, and resilience of the African American community. For decades, Black communities have celebrated Juneteenth as a powerful symbol of perseverance, emphasizing that the fight for freedom and equality remains ongoing. This enduring significance eventually led to its official recognition as a federal holiday in 2021. Juneteenth is a day meant to honor freedom – but more than 150 years later, what does freedom truly look like for Black Americans today?
When President Joe Biden officially declared Juneteenth a federal holiday, he described it as “a day of profound weight and power”, explaining that this new federal holiday would serve as a constant reminder of the ongoing struggle for equality. As the first new federal holiday since Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 1983, many viewed this as a momentous occasion, creating hope for true and lasting change. However, despite this being a significant win for the Black community, a closer look into the everyday lives of Black people reveals clear and persistent struggles this community faces, unlike any other in America. So far, this has largely been perceived as a symbolic gesture rather than real change.
Despite the promises of change that came with federal recognition, systemic injustice is still a prominent and deeply ingrained issue in the daily lives of Black Americans, especially visible in the criminal justice system. As national headlines share, police brutality continues to disproportionately impact Black communities – something they have come to expect and prepare for, and something their white counterparts will never understand. In 2024 alone, Black people were 2.9 times more likely to be killed by police than white people. Starting back in 2020, the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor sparked a movement, seen with the Black Lives Matter protests, demanding change in the police force. Even with the whole country supporting this, there was barely any true reform, and any reform observed has started to roll back.
Aside from police brutality, mass incarceration also tells the grim story of these Black communities. Though African Americans only make up 13% of America’s population, they constitute over 37% of the incarcerated population. Over – policing and racial profiling have remained incredibly high, with data showing a Black person is 5 times more likely to be stopped without cause than a white person, revealing inherent racial bias in law enforcement. Even after these arrests, the justice system adds to this racial bias, with black people facing harsher sentencing, and their incarceration rates being nearly five times those of their white counterparts. Juneteenth was supposed to be a milestone. But for too many, the freedom it celebrates is still undermined by a justice system that treats them as less than equal.
Although law enforcement is one of the most visible inequalities, they don’t start there—they start in childhood. From the moment Black children enter the public school system, they are faced with inequality that is built into the education system. Whether it’s banning books and erasing their history from the classroom, or a lack of access to the same quality education, these systems fail these young children long before they become adults, before they can fully understand their own identities.
Starting with younger education, there has been a drastic increase in anti – Critical Race Theory legislation. Critical Race Theory (CRT) is the concept that racism isn’t just an individual bias, but rather it is built into the structure and systems of American society. Since 2021, 563 anti – CRT bills have been proposed. Out of these, 241 were passed, affecting the education of over 22 million public school students. For those who don’t fully understand what this means, it signifies that the education system is now changing how American history is taught. Rather than fully teaching the concept of systemic racism, white privilege, historic and current racial inequalities, and the legacy of slavery along with the other mistakes that were made in American history, these concepts will now be censored, restricted, and taught in a way that minimizes their importance or suggests they don’t truly exist. By passing these laws, we are changing how young children understand racism, taking away the education that allows for change to happen, and possibly preventing students from engaging in critical thinking related to race and self – identity. Not only that, we are telling African American children that their history should be censored, that it should be changed, and that teaching the history of who they are is not as important as the rest of history.
And it doesn’t stop with lesson plans; schools and libraries are now banning books that talk about slavery, racism, and the Black experience, making it even harder for students to learn the full truth about our history. In the 2023 – 2024 national surge of book bans, there were over 10,000 instances of banning or restricting books in American public schools, a 200% increase from the year before. Of these books, 36% included African Americans and other people of color and 44% of the history and biography books were about people of color. This shows that not only is the narrative in the classroom changing, but access to the truth of history is also being altered. Legislation is attempting to strip any source of the truth about racial history in America from children, even if they want to learn outside the classroom, signaling to them this isn’t something they need to know. These book bans are ultimately restricting these children’s freedom to learn about America’s true history, and they aren’t even old enough to be aware. Erasing this history will be detrimental to future generations and will push the systemic inequality even further than ever before.
Beyond law enforcement, the justice system, and education, Black Americans face deeply rooted disparities in wealth and health – hardships that are unacceptably treated as normal. The racial wealth gap remains staggering and worsened during the covid-19 pandemic. In 2022, for every $100 in wealth white households held, Black households only held $15. This global crisis exposed the generational economic inequality and exclusion these communities have faced, revealing how deeply flawed this system has been and continues to be.
This systemic inequality extends beyond just economic disparities; it expands into the healthcare of these communities. Black women are facing a maternal health crisis, more profoundly than any other race, in a country with the highest maternal mortality rate in the developed world. According to the CDC, in 2023 the maternal mortality rate for Black women was 50.3 deaths per 100,000 live births – a rate more than three times higher than for a white woman (14.5) and substantially higher than for a Hispanic (12.4) and Asian (10.7) woman. The vast difference in numbers isn’t an anomaly, it is a clear reflection of the structural racism that Black women have been facing since before Juneteenth came into existence.
While Black communities take pride in Juneteenth – a day that reflects their resilience, determination, hard – won progress, and ongoing struggles – they still remain aware their fight for true equality is far from over. Too many Americans assume that making Juneteenth a federal holiday means the fight for equality has ended, but in reality, this couldn’t be further from the truth.
Even as one of the world’s most powerful nations, America continues to fall short in protecting and respecting the rights of Black Americans and other minorities. For these communities, these fights aren’t new, they have been passed down from generation to generation, from those who resisted the cruelty of slavery to their descendants who are simply asking for the right to feel safe in their own neighborhood. Even in the 21st century, we’re still seeing what can only be called modern-day lynchings, horrors we like to think are behind us, but that are still happening far too often.
As we honor Juneteenth, we cannot afford to celebrate as though the fight for equality is over, because in reality, it’s far from it. If anything, Juneteenth should serve as a reminder that there is still much more progress to be made, and that the fight for equality continues every day. Until freedom is more than symbolic, Juneteenth has to be more than a holiday, it has to be a demand: a relentless call for the real, systemic change needed to achieve true equity and justice for everyone.
Rafaella Esparza Tello is an undergraduate student at Boston University with a focus on Political Science and Business Administration. She’s an Institute for Liberal Studies intern.
