I was skeptical about celebrating Juneteenth. I held the idea in mild contempt; not impressed with celebrating the arrival of old news.

Juneteenth had never been mentioned in my home, my schools, or in any of the textbooks I studied during the period of legal segregation.

I learned about Juneteenth in the early 1990s when I befriended someone who moved to south Florida from Texas and who wondered why we did not recognize the day.

There is no excuse for ignorance, once information is revealed.

After many years of lobbying, in 2021, the national holiday calendar was expanded to include this day of commemoration. Juneteenth has become a symbol of pride and is another reminder of how Black folk have learned to persevere over every hardship.

What a notion to have learned about the emancipation nearly three years after the fact. But I’m of the opinion that that event joins the list of crimes committed against Black folk.

Yes, there are laws protecting the formerly enslaved, but do they cover this criminal act committed by the Confederacy, an illegitimate government?

The enactment of this new holiday is a nice step. But how can the country determine an equitable payment for such an egregious transgression?

There are many Texas descendants of those receiving the late news who have generational memory of how this event affected their families. Several of the emancipated Blacks got oil rich land which is still in their hands, but they are in a minority.

But many other criminal acts were perpetrated on the newly emancipated, and not just in Texas.

Closely following the emancipation, Jim Crow laws enabled a prison leasing program, lynchings took place throughout the country, as well as other forms of intimidation which included the eradication of whole towns (Rosewood, Tulsa, et al). All these criminal acts kept the Black economy suppressed and sources of independence were squashed by calculated tactics (government supported red-lining, separate-but-equal policies in public spaces, to name a few).

Currently, civil rights gains from the 1960s, including voting rights, are being weakened or reversed (thank you Stacy Abrams, et al. for your advocacy), and policies and laws in support of affirmative action for Blacks are being challenged in the Supreme Court.

Modern-day forms of lynching (the list of police victims is too long), including citizen vigilantism (see subway murder), promotion of “anti-wokeism,” and other forms of brutality are increasing. Statistics published by the FBI, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the ADL show that over the past two decades, most hate-based crimes (64.5%) are based on race, ethnicity, and national origin; the majority committed against Black folk.

What to do? Can anyone say “Reparations?”

While some of us are still waiting for our equivalent of 40 acres and a mule – in today’s dollars calculated at trillions of dollars – marching in the streets is still viable for drawing attention to what matters. Protest politics remains a centerpiece to earn Black progress; we should never abandon this option.

Unbridled excellence in performance, whether on the playing field, in the board room, and everywhere we are permitted, is a hallmark of our continued existence.

But to truly level the playing field, we still need those reparations promised at the emancipation.

Here are a few examples I have been thinking about:

Individual knowledge cannot be erased or legislated away. Let’s renew our commitment to pursue fact-based information. We need a fund for Afrocentric repositories of information, into Black-owned book stores, reading and media centers, to supplement the deficits in public-school librairies.

Retired teachers, where are you?

We need more Black-owned media in order to control our narrative. Fund the growth and development of Afrocentric news/information outlets: thank you Tyler Perry (BET, etc.,) the Black Information Network, the Black Press, et al.

Black wealth through home ownership needs to be leveraged; there are myriad first-time homebuyers programs already available. Toniwg1@gmail.com