BU Today: Prof. Phillipe Copeland, Racial Justice Expert, Discusses Juneteenth
As part of a community photo essay by BU Today, Prof. Phillipe Copeland shared his expertise on Juneteenth, a holiday that celebrates the emancipation of Black Americans from slavery. In addition to contextualizing the event in history, he points to Juneteenth as a guiding light in the racial reckoning we’ve experienced in the past few years.
Excerpt from “What Juneteenth Means to Me: a Photo Essay” by Jackie Ricciardi and Cydney Scott, originally published on BU Today:
“In Black Reconstruction in America, W.E.B. Du Bois memorialized the enslavement and emancipation of Africans this way: ‘The most significant drama in the last thousand years of human history is the transportation of ten million human beings out of the dark beauty of their mother continent in the new-found Eldorado of the West. They descended into Hell; and in the third century they arose from the dead, in the finest effort to achieve democracy for the working millions which this world had ever seen.’
Juneteenth is an opportunity for all freedom-loving people to celebrate this epic drama, to remember its heroes and sheroes, honor their gains, mourn their losses, and learn from both. It is proper that we take a day out of each year to honor our greatest social movement, Abolition. It is proper that we remember the business that remains unfinished from that movement, to contemplate Emancipation as a process, not an event. Juneteenth offers us a Sankofa moment, to go back and get the gifts our Ancestors have left, and use those gifts to become the Ancestors future generations deserve. And even as we face the public and private Hell so many have descended into in recent years, Juneteenth should remind us that Hell can’t have the last word, that each of us can and should rise from the dead, and fight to live fully and freely. Moreover, that we should fight for others as hard as we do for ourselves. Emancipation for all and Happy Juneteenth.”