June 19, 2017

The Juneteenth Memorial Sculpture Monument at the George Washington Carver Museum, Cultural and Genealogy Center opened to the public June 27, 2015, in Austin, Texas. It is made up of five bronze figures Sculpted by Adrienne Rison Isom and Eddie Dixon that represent the story of Juneteeth and a paved timeline of the Black Presence in the Americas, from the Middle Passage to the Emancipation Proclamation. (Jennifer Rangubphai /Wikimedia Commons)

"For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be denounced."

- Frederick Douglass, American abolitionist (1817-1895), from an Independence Day speech given in Rochester, N.Y. on July 4, 1852, (in a northern state where slavery was illegal, while approximately four million people were still enslaved in the U.S. South).

June 19 is Juneteenth,  the observation of Emancipation Day in the United States; it began in Galveston, Texas, in 1865