Celebrate Juneteenth—the annual holiday commemorating the end of legal slavery in the United States—and support the ongoing movement for Black lives and liberation. Come together on our Plaza for poetry readings with Leeza Joneé, Jive Poetic, and Jayson P. Smith organized by writer, educator, and activist Mahogany L. Browne, and have your photo taken in a community portrait session with photography collective Souls in Focus. For those participating in protests and demonstrations throughout Brooklyn, there will be sign-making activities, snacks and water will be available to all, and our restrooms will be open in the Museum lobby beginning at 12 pm.

Juneteenth refers to June 19, 1865, when Union general Gordon Granger read out federal orders declaring that all people previously enslaved in Texas were free. Although the Emancipation Proclamation had formally freed people who were enslaved two and a half years earlier, these orders extended the Proclamation to more than 250,000 people in Texas, the most remote of the former Confederate states. While legally binding, these orders did not enable the freedom of people who were previously enslaved, and those who acted on the news risked violence and terror to actualize their rights. Through grassroots efforts, Black people in Texas reclaimed June 19 as “Juneteenth” a year later, in 1866, and it continues today as a celebration of Black liberation across the country. (To learn more, see Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “What Is Juneteenth?”)