Juneteenth Is an Act of Bravery
Notes from America with Kai Wright
WNYC Studios
4.4 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 19 June 2023
⏱️ 53 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It goes beyond the Emancipation Proclamation. It’s about liberating our own hearts and minds and staking a claim to freedom.
On June 19th, 1865, roughly a quarter million enslaved people in Texas officially learned that they were free, years after the passage of the Emancipation Proclamation. It was the last place the Union delivered news. Kai wants to go to Houston to hear the history, music, and perspective from locals about how they celebrate. And he finds even more – how people create and claim their own freedom.
- Zion Escobar, Executive Director at Houston Freedmen's Town Conservancy. Freedmen’s Town was the first town established by formerly enslaved Black Texans.
- Torin Collins of the Juneteenth Legacy Project.
- Lolade, a native of Nigeria and a vocalist/songwriter/music educator based in Houston.
- Callers, from lawyers to activists to plastic surgeons, who say how they find freedom in their own words, in their own lives.
Tell us what you think. Instagram and Twitter: @noteswithkai. Email us at notes@wnyc.org. Send us a voice message by recording yourself on your phone and emailing us, or going to Instagram and clicking on the link in our bio.
“Notes from America” airs live on Sunday evenings at 6pm ET. The podcast episodes are lightly edited from our live broadcasts. Tune into the show on Sunday nights via the stream on notesfromamerica.org or on WNYC’s YouTube channel.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I know a lot of times people feel shame or discomfort in talking about slavery and the |
| 0:08.1 | Civil War and Juneteenth, but it's not something that we should shy away from, you know, imagine |
| 0:13.0 | that you are going home and there are no portraits of you in your house. |
| 0:17.7 | So everyone is there, your mom, your dad, your siblings, your spouse, your kids, but you |
| 0:24.4 | are not there, right? That would be very uncomfortable, confusing, upsetting, and the Juneteenth |
| 0:31.1 | Legacy Project is here to restore those pictures onto the wall within American history. |
| 0:37.3 | Not take pictures down, not remove anything, but to add that missing information so that |
| 0:41.9 | we have a full history and a full narrative of our full American experience and not just |
| 0:48.3 | the pieces that make us comfortable. |
| 0:54.4 | It's Notes from America, I'm Kai Wright, and Happy Juneteenth. |
| 1:15.5 | The voice you just heard was Torn Collins. She's the daughter of historian Sam Collins, |
| 1:20.7 | aka Professor Juneteenth. Their family created the Juneteenth Legacy Project in Galveston, |
| 1:26.8 | Texas, and earlier this week, Torn gave me and one of our producers a tour of the historic |
| 1:32.1 | site where the Union Army arrived on June 19th, 1865 at the far western edge of the former |
| 1:39.4 | Confederacy. They came to deliver the news of the Emancipation Proclamation. Later in |
| 1:44.7 | this hour, I'll bring you along for a tour of that historic site as well, because we come |
| 1:49.7 | to you this week from the studios of Houston Public Media, our partners in the second annual |
| 1:54.5 | Notes from America Juneteenth celebration. We're going to do a bunch of stuff. We're going |
| 1:58.6 | to go on that tour. We'll hear some live music, and we will take your calls as we learn |
| 2:03.8 | the history of this holiday. Joining me for all of this is Zion Eskbar. Zion is a historic |
| 2:11.2 | preservationist and executive director of the Houston Friedmanstowns Conservancy. She puts |
| 2:16.5 | it, Friedmanstown is the first city established by the last black Americans to seize Emancipation |
... |
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