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We invite our community to reflect on anti-Blackness in U.S. history and present day, and to actively engage in the work to end racism against Black people.
This Saturday, June 19, 2021, is Juneteenth: a holiday recognized by all but three U.S. states to celebrate the day that the last enslaved Black people were liberated in the United States in 1865. The Office of Diversity and Inclusion Advisory Committee invites you to reflect on anti-Blackness in our history and our present day, and to actively engage in the work to end racism against Black people. We also invite you to think about and take action on how each of us can engage in authentic liberatory pedagogy and practice at CIIS and in our communities.
Juneteenth is a time to celebrate Black joy!
Beyond Juneteenth, there are many ways to show support for the Black community and to be inspired, including:
Please see below for more learning resources and ways to celebrate Juneteenth this year.
Juneteenth, also known as Emancipation Day, marks June 19, 1865, the day that the formerly enslaved Black people in Texas found out that the country had ended slavery, and that they were officially and legally free. This date was a full two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr., wrote for The Root:
Of all Emancipation Day observances, Juneteenth falls closest to the summer solstice (this Friday, June 21), the longest day of the year, when the sun, at its zenith, defies the darkness in every state, including those once shadowed by slavery. By choosing to celebrate the last place in the South that freedom touched—reflecting the mystical glow of history and lore, memory and myth, as Ralph Ellison evoked in his posthumous novel, Juneteenth—we remember the shining promise of emancipation, along with the bloody path America took by delaying it and deferring fulfillment of those simple, unanticipating words in Gen. Granger’s original order No. 3 that: “This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves.”
Attend one of these events in the Bay Area:
Celebrated author and somatic therapist Resmaa Menakem will receive an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters and deliver the commencement address.
When Florida laws threatened queer scholarship, CIIS provided a new home
Exploring the Department of Women's Spirituality and celebrating with two events
