Overview

The first fully illustrated history of Juneteenth and other Emancipation Day celebrations, told through photographs, art, and an engrossing narrative from an award-winning historian.? For more than 150 years, Black communities have gathered to honor freedom, resilience, and the ongoing struggle for true liberation. While Juneteenth has recently gained wider recognition, it was one of many Emancipation Day traditions celebrated across the United States. These observances were spaces of joy, remembrance, and resistance-even as the fight for full freedom was unfinished. This volume brings together stirring essays and striking images from Juneteenth and beyond, offering a sweeping portrait of how Black people have created and sustained rituals of remembrance, a testament to the generations who, through celebration and storytelling, demanded that their contributions to the making of America be fully recognized.

Full Product Details

9780762486939

Table of Contents

Reviews

""Black Freedom documents the perseverance, resistance, and, more importantly, the unquenchable joy that is an indelible part of the Black American backstory. Kelley doesn't give us an account; she gives us our account. This is history as it should be told."" --Michael Harriot, New York Times bestselling author of Black AF History ""Blair Kelley's language sings--each sentence shaped with a poet's care, each page alive with the unshakable resolve of Black people. Black Freedom is more than a book; it is a chorus of memory and hope."" --Bettina Love, New York Times bestselling author of Punished for Dreaming ""This is a portal. This is time travel facilitated by one of the great historians of our time. Thanks to Blair Kelley, we can go to an important fissure in the story of domination. We can wonder new wonderings and ask new questions about freedom. We can look love in the face and see what it is asking of us now.""--Alexis Pauline Gumbs, award-winning author of Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde

Author Information

Blair L.M. Kelley is the director of the Center for the Study of the American South and codirector of the Southern Futures initiative at the University of North Carolina. Her first book, Right to Ride, won the Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Prize, and she received a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant to support her writing of Black Folk. She lives in Durham, North Carolina.

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