What Does Juneteenth Really Mean?

In September 1954 I started the 5th grade at West Elementary School on Farragut Street in Washington, D.C. When I walked into the classroom, I immediately noticed that some of my classmates were black, which was quite a change because I had never before seen a black student in my school.

The D.C. schools, believe it or not, were segregated until the Court pronounced Brown v. Board in 1953, and since D.C. was federal property, the schools had to be integrated right away. They did it over two years — the first year they integrated a pilot school, the second year the entire D.C. school system changed.

My school, West Elementary, was the pilot school. So, I can honestly say that I was a student in the very first school where racial segregation was first abolished in the United States.

I always liked Jimmy Carter for one, simple reason — he pardoned the Viet Nam war resisters. I’ll always like Joe Biden if for no other reason (although there are plenty of other reasons) than he signed the bill making Juneteenth a federal holiday. And now we have a remarkable, an extraordinarily remarkable video produced by the Annenberg program at U/Penn, which places Juneteenth within its proper historical context and deserves to be seen, indeed must be seen.