Why it’s hard to get in the spirit of Juneteenth in 2025

I was a student at Southern University, a historically Black university, when I learned the truth about Juneteenth and its correlation with our freedom. I may have heard of Juneteenth before then, but I couldn’t have told you that it fell on June 19 or that it celebrated the day after the Civil War when enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, learned they were free. I learned the truth because of the Afrocentric brothers and sisters on campus who more or less demanded that their schoolmates “do the knowledge” about our history.