NOTE: The Des Plaines Public Library will be closed this June 19th in honor of Juneteenth. There will be a display on the third and fourth floors containing media that honors the holiday.
What is Juneteenth?
Juneteenth is a federal American holiday that is also known as “Freedom Day,” a celebration of freeing those who were enslaved.
It honors those who were lost during slavery.
It is a national, symbolic celebration of respect for all cultures.
It demonstrates the fight for freedom for everyone, that no one is free until we are all free.
While it is important to celebrate freedom on this holiday, it is also important to understand the historical significance of this date and why we celebrate.
It was the time of the Civil War. On January 1, 1863, Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing the slaves in all of the United States.
However, there were some slave owners who did not abide by this new law. In fact, Union soldiers were tasked with telling slaves in the southern states that they were free.
Confederate soldiers and plantation owners would try to stop this initiative. A Confederate troop succeeded in blocking Union soldiers from telling slaves of their freedom in Galveston, Texas, where they kept slaves for over two years of their legal freedom.
Union General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston on June 19, 1865, two months after the end of the Civil War, and delivered the news of the Emancipation Proclamation to all in the city.
It is this day that we remember in history as the end of slavery in the United States, cemented with the ratification of the 13th Amendment in December 1865, abolishing all slavery.
As a holiday, Juneteenth was celebrated much in the years following 1865, but became hard for people to celebrate due to work, as it often fell on a weekday.
The holiday had a resurgence due to the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950’s and 1960’s, when African Americans reconnected this date with their heritage, using it to fuel their fight for equal rights.
It became an official Texas state holiday thanks to Texas legislator Al Edwards on January 1, 1980.
How can you celebrate this Juneteenth?
Many people celebrate by going to a Juneteenth parade, flying the Juneteenth flag, by dancing, going to church, through singing, dressing up, telling stories, and most importantly, relaxing, and spending time with family and friends.
Red food is eaten, such as red velvet cake, and red drinks are shared, such as strawberry punch, to symbolize the suffering, bloodshed, and sacrifice of those enslaved and their struggle for freedom.
Many historical institutions, such as the Smithsonian museums, sponsor activities and celebrations for Juneteenth.
You can celebrate by spending time with your family and friends, checking out the displays on our third and fourth floors, and perhaps, even by enjoying the library materials below, whether it is through cooking a red dish, listening to a rendition of Lift Every Voice and Sing, pursuing through a picture book, or reading a memoir.
To learn more about the history of Juneteenth, you can research through DPPL’s various history databases.
You can also check out the following items, which embody the spirit of Juneteenth.
If you would like more suggestions, please stop by our 2nd, 3rd, or 4th floors and ask a Librarian.
Interweaving American history, dramatic family chronicle, and searing episodes of memoir, Annette Gordon-Reed, the descendant of enslaved people brought to Texas in the 1850s, recounts the origins of Juneteenth and explores the legacies of the holiday that remain with us. From the earliest presence of black people in Texas-in the 1500s, well before enslaved Africans arrived in Jamestown-to the day in Galveston on June 19, 1865, when General Gordon Granger announced the end of slavery, Gordon-Reed's insightful and inspiring essays present the saga of a "frontier" peopled by Native Americans, Anglos, Tejanos, and Blacks that became a slaveholder's republic. Reworking the "Alamo" framework, Gordon-Reed shows that the slave-and race-based economy not only defined this fractious era of Texas independence, but precipitated the Mexican-American War and the resulting Civil War. A commemoration of Juneteenth and the fraught legacies of slavery that still persist, On Juneteenth is stark reminder that the fight for equality is ongoing.
How the Word is Passed' is Clint Smith's revealing, contemporary portrait of America as a slave-owning nation. Beginning in his own hometown of New Orleans, Smith leads the reader through an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks - those that are honest about the past and those that are not - that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation's collective history, and ourselves.
A new historical anthology from transatlantic slavery to the Reconstruction curated by the Schomburg Center, that makes the case for focusing on the histories of Black people as agents and architects of their own lives and ultimate liberation ... Unsung will place well-known documents by abolitionists alongside lesser-known life stories and overlooked or previously uncelebrated accounts of the everyday lives and activism that were central in the slavery era, but that are mostly excised from today's master accounts.
On June 19, 1865, more than two years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, General Order No. 3 informed the people of Texas that all enslaved people were now free. In 1866, Juneteenth celebrations were celebrated with music, dance, and BBQs. Taylor bridges the traditional African American table and twenty-first century flavors with stories and recipes that will inspire parties to salute the holiday, or to help you create moments to savor joy all year round.
The Juneteenth Cookbook introduces the history of Juneteenth to kids through vibrant recipes, activities, and games drawn from Black American cultural traditions
Debbie Moose's Southern Holidays is a cook's celebration of the richly diverse holiday traditions of today's South. Covering big traditional holidays such as Christmas and Mardi Gras, this must-have addition to the Savor the South® cookbook collection also branches out into regional and cultural holidays that honor newer southern traditions, including recipes from real cooks hailing from a range of ethnic traditions and histories. The cooks' stories accompanying the recipes show how holiday foods not only hold cherished personal family memories but also often have roots in a common past that ties families together in a shared southern history.
The story of a black man who passes for white and becomes a race-baiting U.S. senator. When he is shot on the Senate floor, the first visitor in hospital is a black musician-turned-preacher who raised him. As the two men talk, their respective stories come out. An unfinished novel by the author of Invisible Man.
In the quirky, picturesque lakeside community of Lily Dale, where the residents can talk to the dead, young widow Bella Jordan is the lone skeptic among believers. She doesn't believe in ghosts... but after a year in the village, she would admit that her new friends do sometimes seem to know impossible things. Still, when a Black stranger dressed in old-fashioned clothing arrives unexpectedly at Bella's guesthouse at midnight on Juneteenth, only to vanish the next day as if he'd never existed, Bella's sure there has to be a logical explanation.
This reimagining of "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" is told from Jim’s perspective, highlighting his intelligence, agency, and compassion. Fearing separation from his family, Jim runs away, while Huck fakes his own death to escape his father, leading them on a perilous journey down the Mississippi River. While key events from the original story remain, this version offers a fresh perspective on Jim’s character and struggles.
This novel is a moving story of love in the face of injustice. Told through the eyes of Tish, a nineteen-year-old girl, in love with Fonny, a young sculptor who is the father of her child, the story mixes the sweet and the sad. Tish and Fonny have pledged to get married, but Fonny is falsely accused of a terrible crime and imprisoned. Their families set out to clear his name, and as they face an uncertain future, the young lovers experience a kaleidoscope of emotions: affection, despair, and hope. In a love story that evokes the blues, where passion and sadness are inevitably intertwined, the author has created two characters so alive and profoundly realized that they are unforgettably ingrained in the American psyche.
The film centers around a group of Black friends who reunite for a Juneteenth weekend getaway only to find themselves trapped in a remote cabin with a twisted killer. Forced to play by his rules, the friends soon realize this ain't no game ... This film skewers genre tropes and poses the sardonic question: if the entire cast of a horror movie is Black, who dies first?
A stunning, all-new collection of prayers, poetry, and spiritual practice centering the Black interior world, from the New York Times bestselling author of This Here Flesh and creator of Black Liturgies. In the summer of 2020, Cole Arthur Riley was desperate for a spirituality she could trust. Amidst ongoing national racial violence, the isolation of the pandemic, and a surge of anti-Black rhetoric in many Christian spaces, she began dreaming of a harbor for a more human, more liberating expression of faith. She went on to create Black Liturgies, a digital project that connects spiritual practice with Black emotion, memory, and the Black body. In this book, she deepens the work of that project, bringing together new prayers, letters, poetry, meditation questions, breath practice, and the writings of Black literary ancestors to offer 43 liturgies that can be practiced individually or as a community. With a poet's touch and a sensitivity that has made her one of the most important spiritual voices at work today, Riley invites readers to reflect on their own experiences of wonder, rest, rage, and repair, while also including liturgies for holidays like Lent, Advent, Juneteenth, and Mother's Day. For those healing from spiritual spaces that were more violent than loving; for those who have escaped the trauma of white Christian nationalism, religious homophobia, and transphobia; for anyone asking what it means to be human in a world of both beauty and terror; Black Liturgies is a work of healing and liberation, and a vision for what might be.
Across a turbulent history, Black poets created a rich and multifaceted tradition that has been both a reckoning with American realities and an imaginative response to them. One of the great American art forms, African American poetry encompasses many kinds of verse: formal, experimental, vernacular, lyric, and protest. The anthology opens with moving testaments to the power of poetry as a means of self-assertion, as enslaved people voice their passionate resistance to slavery. This volume captures the power and beauty of this diverse tradition and its challenge to American poetry and culture. Here are all the significant movements and currents: the nineteenth-century Francophone poets known as Les Cenelles, the Chicago Renaissance that flourished around Gwendolyn Brooks, the early 1960s Umbra group, and the more recent work of writers affiliated with Cave Canem and the Dark Noise Collective. Here too are poems of singular, hard-to-classify figures: the enslaved potter David Drake, the allusive modernist Melvin B. Tolson, the Cleveland-based experimentalist Russell Atkins. The volume also features biographies of each poet and notes that illuminate cultural references and allusions to historical events.
Poet Renée Watson looks back at her childhood and urges readers to look forward at their futures with love, understanding, and celebration in this fully illustrated poetry collection.
Join host and Chef Lidia Bastianich and her celebrity cast as she celebrates independence and freedom with different cultures across America. Our celebrity cast includes: actress Anna Deavere Smith, opera singer Renee Fleming, singer Martha Wainwright, Chef Jacques Pepin, actor Alex Mapa and former Olympic athlete Nadia Comaneci.
The first documentary on one of the most gifted and intellectually provocative authors of modern American literature. It establishes Ellison as a central figure in contemporary debates over art, politics, race and nationhood. Narrated by Andre Braugher, the film brilliantly presents the first scenes ever filmed from Ellison's landmark novel, Invisible Man.
In RALPH ELLISON: AN AMERICAN JOURNEY, Cornel West, Amiri Baraka, Stanley Crouch, Terrance Rafferty and other cultural critics, reconstruct the debates and discuss the roles and responsibilities of a “Negro writer." Ellison’s responses to his critics are collected in the essays in Shadow and Act and Going to the Territory. He held that American Blacks and whites, whether they know it or not, are entwined in building a common national experience.
Perhaps it was the difficulty of achieving such a synthesis that led to Ellison's famous struggle on his never completed second novel, Juneteenth, published only after his death. In the film, friends and critics discuss the book, but it’s a poignant reading by Toni Morrison that brings the novel to startling life. RALPH ELLISON: AN AMERICAN JOURNEY explores the many ways one of our most important writers and thinkers grappled with the question: "What does it mean to be an American?"
Official Selection at the Sundance Film Festival.
Jacoby tells a new story of the black experience in America through the life of a mysterious entrepreneur. To his contemporaries in Gilded Age Manhattan, Guillermo Eliseo was a fantastically wealthy Mexican, the proud owner of a luxury apartment overlooking Central Park, a busy Wall Street office, and scores of mines and haciendas in Mexico. But for all his obvious riches and his elegant appearance, Eliseo was also the possessor of a devastating secret: he was not, in fact, from Mexico at all.
A family reunion gives way to an unforgettable genealogical quest as relatives reconnect across lines of color, culture, and time, putting the past into urgent conversation with the present. In 1791, Thomas Jefferson hired a Black man to help survey Washington, DC. That man was Benjamin Banneker, an African American mathematician, a writer of almanacs, and one of the greatest astronomers of his generation. Banneker then wrote what would become a famous letter to Jefferson, imploring the new president to examine his hypocrisy, as someone who claimed to love liberty yet was an enslaver. More than two centuries later, Rachel Jamison Webster, an ostensibly white woman, learns that this groundbreaking Black forefather is also her distant relative. Acting as a storyteller, Webster draws on oral history and conversations with her DNA cousins to imagine the lives of their shared ancestors across eleven generations, among them Banneker's grandparents, an interracial couple who broke the law to marry when America was still a conglomerate of colonies under British rule. These stories shed light on the legal construction of race and display the brilliance and resistance of early African Americans in the face of increasingly unjust laws, some of which are still in effect in the present day.
Interconnected stories present a picture of racial inequality in America, showing systemic discrimination in all areas of society and showing the unbroken line of Black resistance to this inequality.
In the Jim Crow South, white supremacy reigns and tensions are high. But Evalene Deschamps has other things to worry about. She has two little sisters to look after, an overworked single mother, and a longtime crush who is finally making a move. On top of all that, Evvie's magic abilities are growing stronger by the day. Her family calls it jubilation--a gift passed down from generations of black women since the time of slavery. And as Evvie's talents waken, something dark comes loose and threatens to resurface...AND when the demons of Evvie's past finally shake free, she must embrace her mighty lineage, and summon the power that lies within her.
A comprehensive history of anti-black racism in graphic-novel format focuses on the lives of five major players in American history and highlights the debates that took place between assimilationists and segregationists and between racists and anti-racists.
In 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation declared that all enslaved people in Confederate States were legally free. But word traveled slowly during the Civil War. It wasn't until June 19, 1865--more than two months after the war ended--that the good news finally reached Galveston, Texas. From that moment forward, June 19 became a day to celebrate freedom--first in Texas and then across the country. How did Juneteenth develop over time, and what is the holiday's enduring legacy? Find out in an easy-to-read graphic novel that reveals why Juneteenth's evolution into a federal holiday is among the greatest moments in history.
Brings to light for the first time the existence of enslaved black women warriors, whose stories can be traced by carefully scrutinizing historical records; and where the historical record goes silent... reconstructs the likely past of two female rebels, Adono and Alele, on the slave ship The Unity. [This book] offers invaluable insight into the struggle to survive whole as a black woman in today's America; it is a historiography that illuminates both the challenges and the necessity of uncovering the true stories of slavery; and it is an overdue reckoning with slavery in New York City where two of these armed revolts took place. It is, also, a transformative and transporting work of imaginative fiction, bringing to three-dimensional life Adono and Alele and their pasts as women warriors.
In her most famous spoken-word poem, author of the Pura Belpré-winning novel-in-verse The Poet X Elizabeth Acevedo embraces all the complexities of Black hair and Afro-Latinidad--the history, pain, pride, and powerful love of that inheritance. Paired with full-color illustrations by artist Andrea Pippins in a format that will appeal to fans of Mahogany L. Browne's Black Girl Magic or Jason Reynolds's For Everyone, this poem can now be read in a vibrant package, making it the ideal gift, treasure, or inspiration for readers of any age.
Meticulously researched and drawn from numerous primary sources, this biography-in-verse tells the story of racism in the U.S. through six important Black Americans from different eras who struggled for justice, chronicling how much--and how little--racism has changed since our country's founding.
Using Olaudah Equiano's autobiography as the source, the text shares Equiano's life story in found verse. Readers will follow his story from his childhood in Africa, enslavement at a young age, liberation, and life as a free man.
An African American family attends a modern-day Juneteenth parade in Galveston, Texas (the birthplace of the holiday). Text includes lines from "Lift Every Voice and Sing."
Developed by literacy experts and educators for students in PreK through grade two, this book introduces beginning readers to Juneteenth through simple, predictable text and related photos.
A Flag for Juneteenth depicts a close-knit community of enslaved African Americans on a plantation in Texas, the day before the announcement is to be made that all enslaved people are free. Young Huldah, who is preparing to celebrate her tenth birthday, can't possibly anticipate how much her life will change that Juneteenth morning. The story follows Huldah and her community as they process the news of their freedom and celebrate together by creating a community freedom flag. Debut author and artist Kim Taylor sets this story apart by applying her skills as an expert quilter. Each of the illustrations has been lovingly hand sewn and quilted, giving the book a homespun, tactile quality that is altogether unique.
Little Mazie wants the freedom to stay up late, but her father explains what freedom really means in the story of Juneteenth, and how her ancestors celebrated their true freedom.
Illustrations and easy-to-read text follow a family through five generations as each is inspired by the song written in 1900 to honor Abraham Lincoln. Includes author's note on the history of the song and its meaning in her family.
In this book, early fluent readers will learn about the history of Juneteenth, including when, where, and who first celebrated Emancipation Day, its meaning, the traditions associated with it, and how African American people around the United States celebrate independence today. Vibrant, full-color photos and carefully leveled text will engage young readers as they learn more about the history behind this important holiday that freed enslaved people.
Deeply emotional, evocative free verse by poet and activist Sojourner Kincaid Rolle traces the solemnity and celebration of Juneteenth from its 1865 origins in Galveston, Texas to contemporary observances all over the United States. This is an ode to the strength of Black Americans and a call to remember and honor a holiday whose importance reverberates far beyond the borders of Texas.
In You Choose format, explores the history of Juneteenth Day, including the Emancipation Proclamation, the post-Civil War South, and efforts to end racism.
When Bo burns the cake he was making with his Grandfather for the Juneteenth picnic, Bo volunteers to help Chef Jeff in his restaurant prepare a new dish.
Fourteen-year-old Luli and her family face tragedy after failing to tell their slaves that President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation made them free.
