Juneteenth Holiday

[Chuck Naill]

It's been in the past five years that I learned about Juneteenth. I am white. I told my African American nurse about the history of emancipated Texan slaves in 1865. She was unaware.

In the city where I grew up, African Americans were allowed to go to a city park on Juneteenth where they enjoyed the pools and grounds for picnicing and swimming. The next day the pools were drained and refilled. The park was scrubbed.

Also in the same city the history of taking homes and land away from black people is becoming known. These properties were then used to build city buildings.

I encounter white people who think these events are much to do about nothing, but for me, it is a time of reckoning and an opportunity to learn and make personal changes in how I think. If you take away someone's home and land without proper compensation, and they loose that generational wealth, and then you tell them to pull themselves up be their boot straps, it reminds me a what Dr. King said, "you don't tell a bootless man to pull himself up by his bootstraps".

Folks don't change as long as they ignore or dis the truth. Hopefully enough will reconsider and lend our minds to the effort to overcome, as Norman Rockwell said, "a problem we all live with.

"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice". MLK