The George Washington University’s Post

Transcript

- My name is Imani Cheers, and I'm an associate professor of digital storytelling here at GW. I've been here for 10 years, and it's really been a blessing to be able to share a little bit about my family's connection with Freedom Day, otherwise known as Juneteenth. Juneteenth has been, and historically is known, as the day in which on June 19th, 1865, Union soldiers finally made it to Galveston, Texas and shared the news: the Emancipation Proclamation freed all enslaved people in the United States. And unfortunately, it took two years for that message, that information, that declaration, to make it all the way to Texas, where over 250,000 people of African descent were still enslaved. I think it's really powerful that Juneteenth is our most recent federal holiday in the United States, and the reality of that is acknowledging across the board that this is a day that should be commemorated. It is truly the day that all people in the United States were able to enjoy the benefits of freedom, and that is something that has been really, really, really powerful over the last couple of years, the acknowledgement of this incredibly important and historic day, a day that has been celebrated in Black communities for decades, but to finally have it on the federal level. And it was such a blessing for my mother to be able to see that before she passed, my grandmother who passed in March of this year, for her to be able to celebrate that, because these were things that they had longed for, the acknowledgement on a national level of the struggles that African Americans have endured in this country for centuries. Last year, I opened a photography exhibition at the Corcoran School of Art called Framing Fatherhood. When I saw that Juneteenth and Father's Day were actually going to fall on the same day in 2022, I knew that that was going to be not only a historic and beautiful moment, but a moment that I wanted to celebrate not only Black men, Black families, Black children, in a way that in this iconic building that the Corcoran School of Art sits in, right on 17th Street, directly across the street from the White House. And that was really, really powerful and meaningful. It was meaningful for me. My mother came out, my father was there. And it was just a beautiful time for our family to not only celebrate the work that I was trying to do, curating this art exhibition celebrating Black men and their children, but to have it fall on this really historic and meaningful day for not only, you know, fathers, but the Black community in general, and have that day fall on the same day was really, really powerful and important. My mother, Darline Cheers, who passed away in October of 2022, she always instilled in myself, my siblings, and her grandson, my son Isaiah, the importance of understanding and knowing our history, our culture, and not only how it relates to the United States but also how it relates to the entire African diaspora. And so it really is a moment for our family but for really the Black community and the United States to acknowledge that this is truly our Independence Day, Freedom Day, June 19th, 1865.