...all slaves are free in Texas and that there would be an absolute equality of personal rights of property between former slaves and master.- Major General Gordon Granger, Galveston, Texas, June 19, 1865 (General Order No. 3)
Two and one-half years after President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation to end slavery, Major General Granger delivered the news to the enslaved in Gavelston, Texas that they were emancipated from slavery and the Civil War had ended. Many slave owners held the enslaved captive after the announcement; Juneteenth became a symbolic date representing Black African American freedom.
Texans began celebrating Juneteenth in 1866. In 2021, Juneteenth became a federal holiday celebrating the emancipation of the generations of enslaved in the United States, also known as Juneteenth National Independence Day, Jubilee Day, Emancipation Day, Freedom Day, and Black Independence Day.
Juneteenth commemorates Black African-American freedom and emphasizes education and achievement. It is a day, a week, and in some areas a month marked with community-centric events: parades, cookouts, prayer gatherings, historical and cultural readings, and musical performances. It is also often observed for celebrating African-American culture.
News and Articles
Ms. Opal Lee, affectionately referred to as the Grandmother of Juneteenth, recalls her visit with President Biden and being on hand for the Juneteenth ceremony that made it a national holiday. Lee had long pushed for Juneteenth to be recognized as a national holiday.
In 2016, she walked 1,400 miles from Fort Worth to Washington, D.C., to bring attention to the holiday, often referred to as Black Independence Day. Juneteenth marks the day freedom was declared for slaves in Texas, the last state in the Confederacy to have institutional slavery.
The 1619 Project tells this new origin story, placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a country. Orchestrated by the editors of The New York Times Magazine, led by MacArthur "genius" and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, this collection of essays and historical vignettes includes some of the most outstanding journalists, thinkers, and scholars of American history and culture.
The author explodes the myth that America's cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation - that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies. Rather, this book incontrovertibly makes it clear that it was de jure segregation - the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments - that actually promoted the discriminatory patterns that have continued into the twenty-first century. -- Jacket.
Legal scholar Michelle Alexander argues vigorously and persuasively that “[w]e have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.” Jim Crow and legal racial segregation has been replaced by mass incarceration as “a system of social control” (“More African Americans are under correctional control today... than were enslaved in 1850”). Alexander reviews American racial history from the colonies to the Clinton administration, delineating its transformation into the “war on drugs.”
In Rock My Soul, world-renowned scholar and visionary bell hooks takes an in-depth look at one of the most critical issues facing African Americans: a collective wounded self-esteem that has prevailed from slavery to the present day.
Nancy Heitzeg describes the hardships that African American adolescents endure through their schooling as they are discriminated and treated unfairly through discipline according to their race. Heitzeg introduces readers to the idea of the school-to-prison pipeline by providing research on what the pipeline is, how it was created, and how it continues to be an issue for adolescents.
Historian Ibram X. Kendi argues racist ideas in this country have a long and lingering history, one in which nearly every great American thinker is complicit. Kendi chronicles the entire story of anti-Black racist ideas and their staggering power over the course of American history.
Featuring a solid cast of veteran players (Pharoah Sanders, Idris Muhammad, Dewey Redman, and a guest appearance by Dizzy Gillespie on "African Sunrise"), Weston and arranger Melba Liston put together music with great breadth, influenced by Thelonious Monk.
Out of Africa : foods, techniques, and ceremonies of the mother continent -- Sea changes : enslavement, the middle passage, and the migrating tastes of Africa -- The power of three : arrivals, encounters, and culinary connections -- The tightening vice : indenture to enslavement and the African hand in the food of Colonial America
Through much of the twentieth century, black Seattle was synonymous with the Central District - a four-square-mile section near the geographic center of the city. Quintard Taylor explores the evolution of this community from its first few residents in the 1870s to a population of nearly forty thousand in 1970.
Mumford’s landmark history provides a window into the lives of some of Seattle’s earliest African American citizens. Mumford is a leading authority on the history of African Americans in the Pacific Northwest and one of the founders of the Black Heritage Society of Washington State.
"...Barracoon — the word comes from the Spanish word for "barracks" — came about in 1927... Zora [Neale Hurston] was assigned a task by famed anthropologist Franz Boas: interviewing an 86-year-old former slave living in the tiny town of Plateau, Ala. Oluale Kossula — also known by the slave name of Cudjo Lewis — had a remarkable past. Raised to the age of 19 in West Africa, he was captured and brought to the United States as a captive on Clotilda, the fabled last ship... of the transatlantic slave trade." -- npr.org
Homegoing follows the parallel paths of two sisters and their descendants through eight generations: from the Gold Coast to the plantations of Mississippi, from the American Civil War to Jazz Age Harlem. Yaa Gyasi's extraordinary novel illuminates slavery's troubled legacy both for those who were taken and those who stayed--and shows how the memory of captivity has been inscribed on the soul of our nation.
In these stories, N.K. Jemisin (a four-time Hugo Award winner) sharply examines modern society, infusing magic into the mundane, and drawing deft parallels in the fantasy realms of her imagination. Dragons and hateful spirits haunt the flooded streets of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In a parallel universe, a utopian society watches our world, trying to learn from our mistakes. A Black mother in the Jim Crow South must save her daughter from a fey offering impossible promises. And in the Hugo award-nominated short story "The City Born Great," a young street kid fights to give birth to an old metropolis's soul.
As Whitehead re-creates the unique terrors for Black people in the pre-Civil War era, his narrative weaves the saga of America from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day.
In the last several years, Black feminism has reemerged as the analytical framework for the activist response to the oppression of trans women of color, the fight for reproductive rights, and, of course, the movement against police abuse and violence. The most visible organizations and activists connected to the Black Lives Matter movement speak openly about how Black feminism shapes their politics and strategies today.
What is the meaning of freedom? Angela Y. Davis' life and work have been dedicated to examining this fundamental question and to ending all forms of oppression that deny people their political, cultural, and sexual freedom. In this collection of twelve searing, previously unpublished speeches, Davis confronts the interconnected issues of power, race, gender, class, incarceration, conservatism, and the ongoing need for social change in the United States.
Continuing a conversation about activism, resistance, and justice that embraces our nation's complex history, he dissects how deliberate oppression persists, how racial injustice strips our lives of promise, and how technology has added a new dimension to mass action and social change
History of Slavery
The U.S. slavery and the United States' wealth and structure development were intertwined and depended upon free labor; this shared history was created by edicts and constitutions, as well as by the actions and reactions of individuals.
Full Video (03:05)
1619 was a significant year in the history of America for better and for worse. In Jamestown, Virginia the first slaves were imported and sold. Meet Nikole Hannah-Jones; author of New York Times' "1619 Project" who will examine the impact of that year on American History, culture and development.
Call Number: Central Videos & DVDs E441.A37 2000 [DVD]
ISBN: 9781578075539
Publication Date: 2000
A four part series portraying the struggles of the African people in America. This series exposes the truth through surprising revelations, dramatic recreations, rare archival photography, riveting first-person accounts and defines the reality of slavery's past through insightful commentary.
Historian Edward Baptist reveals how the expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American independence drove the evolution and modernization of the United States.
Groundbreaking look at slaves as commodities through every phase of life, from birth to death and beyond, in early America The Price for Their Pound of Flesh is the first book to explore the economic value of enslaved people through every phase of their lives--including from before birth to after death--in the American domestic slave trades. Analyzing the depth of this monetization of human property will change the way we think about slavery, reparations, capitalism, and nineteenth-century medical education.
Political Action
The Black Power Mixtape : 1967-1975 by Göran Olsson (Editor); Angela Y. Davis (Contribution by); Stokely Carmichel (Contribution by)
ISBN: 9781608462964
Publication Date: 2014-02-25
"Featuring images only recently discovered in the archives of Swedish television, here is the Black power movement as you've never seen it. Powerful interviews with Stokely Carmichel, Angela Davis and others who shaped the struggle of their day are mixed with the contemporary reflections of leading activists, musicians and scholars, introducing a new generation to the legacy of Black Power"-- Provided by publisher.
The imperialists know the only way you will voluntarily turn to the fox is to show you a wolf. In eleven speeches and interviews, Malcolm X presents a revolutionary alternative to this reformist trap, taking up political alliances, women's rights, U.S. intervention in the Congo and Vietnam, capitalism and socialism, and more.
In an age of Black Lives Matter, James Baldwin's essays on life in Harlem, the protest novel, movies, and African Americans abroad are as powerful today as when they were first written. Written during the 1940s and early 1950s, when Baldwin was only in his twenties, the essays collected in Notes of a Native Son capture a view of black life and black thought at the dawn of the civil rights movement and as the movement slowly gained strength through the words of one of the most captivating essayists and foremost intellectuals of that era. Writing as an artist, activist, and social critic, Baldwin probes the complex condition of being black in America.
"When #BlackLivesMatter went viral in 2013, it shed a light on the urgent, daily struggles of Black Americans to combat racial injustice. The message resonated with millions across the country. Yet many of our political, social, and economic institutions are still embedded with racist policies and practices that devalue Black lives. Stay Woke directly addresses these stark injustices and builds on the lessons of racial inequality and intersectionality the Black Lives Matter movement has challenged its fellow citizens to learn.
Patrisse Cullors’ first book cowritten by ashe bandele, is a poetic memoir and reflection on humanity. Leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement have been called terrorists, a threat to America. But in truth, they are loving women whose life experiences have led them to seek justice for those victimized by the powerful. In this meaningful, empowering account of survival, strength, and resilience, Patrisse Cullors and asha bandele seek to change the culture that declares innocent black life expendable.
Recent waves of social activism like the Occupy movement and Black Lives Matter show that you can fight city hall--or any other powerful entity for that matter. Now comes the playbook for citizen activists wanting to improve the world around them from Nick Licata, admired Seattle city councilmember and one of the city's most effective leaders of political and social change since the 1960s. In this smart and powerful book, Licata explains how to get organized, congregate power, and master the tactics for change.
The 1619 Project : a new origin story by 
The color of law : a forgotten history of how our government segregated America by 
New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by 
Rock My Soul by 
The school-to-prison pipeline : education, discipline, and racialized double standards by 
Stamped from the Beginning by 
Beyond Slavery : The Multilayered Legacy of Africans in Latin America and the Caribbean by 
High on the Hog : a culinary journey from Africa to America by 
The Forging of a Black Community by 
Seattle's Black Victorians, 1852 to 1901 by 
Barracoon by 
Homegoing by 
How Long 'Til Black Future Month? by 
The Underground Railroad by 
How We Get Free by 
The Meaning of Freedom by 
On the Other Side of Freedom by 
Africans in America America's journey through slavery
Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880 by 
The Half Has Never Been Told by 
The Price for Their Pound of Flesh by 
The Black Power Mixtape : 1967-1975 by 
By Any Means Necessary by 
Notes of a Native Son by 
Stay woke : a people's guide to making all Black lives matter by 
When They Call You a Terrorist by 
Becoming a citizen activist : stories, strategies, & advice for changing our world