Red, White, and True: Defending the Freedmen Legacy of Juneteenth
How Juneteenth Came to Be
I write to you as a Black American Freedman and Detroit business owner who carries the weight of a legacy built on perseverance. Every year on June 19, my heart swells with the remembrance of Juneteenth, the day in 1865 when the last of my enslaved ancestors in Texas learned they were free at last. It took two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation for freedom to reach Galveston, Texas, where Union General Gordon Granger arrived on June 19, 1865 and read General Order No. 3 announcing the end of slavery. Over 250,000 enslaved Black people in Texas finally received word that they were free by executive decree. This delayed liberation – freedom deferred but not denied – is why Juneteenth is often called our country’s second Independence Day.
What caused the delay? In short, Texas remained a bastion of slavery until Union troops arrived. The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 had declared slaves free in Confederate states, but could not be enforced in places still under Confederate control. Texas, the westernmost Confederate state, saw little combat or Union presence, so slavery persisted there well after Confederate surrender. When freedom finally came, it came suddenly – imagine the mixture of joy and confusion as my forebears in Galveston heard they were no longer anyone’s property. The following year, in 1866, they began celebrating Juneteenth (a folk blending of “June” and “nineteenth”) as a holiday marking deliverance from bondage.
From the beginning, Juneteenth was about more than a date – it was about fulfilling the promise of America. My great-great-grandparents, like other newly freed people, left plantations in what became known as the “Scatter”, seeking lost family and new futures. They called Juneteenth by many names: Freedom Day, Jubilee Day, Cel-Liberation Day, Second Independence Day, Emancipation Day – all capturing the spiritual significance of emancipation. In those early years, formerly enslaved Texans pooled $800 to buy land for celebrating freedom – creating Houston’s Emancipation Park in 1872 specifically for Juneteenth gatherings. This little-known fact speaks volumes: even in freedom, our people had to carve out spaces to celebrate because public spaces were barred to them. Juneteenth became a time for barbecues, music, prayer, and the redemptive act of gathering as a free community.
Yet the holiday’s journey was as turbulent as our own. During Jim Crow and the Great Depression, Juneteenth celebrations waned – it’s hard to celebrate freedom under the shadow of segregation, and harder still when you can’t afford a day off work. But the spirit of Juneteenth endured. The civil rights movement reclaimed it: Dr. King’s Poor People’s March was deliberately scheduled for Juneteenth 1968, and those participants carried the tradition back across the country, sparking a revival. By the time I was a child in Detroit, Juneteenth was blooming into the nationwide occasion it is today – even if many Americans only learned of it recently. As of 2021, Juneteenth is a federal holiday, finally acknowledged by the nation that once denied our freedom. But in Black communities like mine, we long regarded Juneteenth as sacred – a triumph our ancestors won, and proof that American freedom was never just handed over; it was claimed.
The Juneteenth Flag: Symbols of Freedom and a New Horizon
The Juneteenth flag’s design is rich with symbolism, each element telling a part of the Freedmen story.
Just as Juneteenth itself was born in Texas and spread nationwide, its symbols carry deep meaning for Black American Freedmen like me. In 1997, activist Ben Haith created the Juneteenth flag to give this day a bold emblem. Refined in 2000 by artist Lisa Jeanne Graf, the flag is visually simple yet powerful: red and blue fields divided by an arc, a central white star outlined by a bursting nova. Each piece of this design speaks to an aspect of our journey from enslavement to freedom:
The Star: The lone white star in the center pays homage to Texas, the Lone Star State where Juneteenth was first celebrated. It also symbolizes the freedom of Black Americans in all 50 states – a reminder that what started in Galveston spread to liberate all of our people. In one elegant symbol, the star says: Texas, and by extension America, finally saw its Black sons and daughters as free. (Some elders even note how our ancestors escaping slavery used the North Star as guidance to liberty, linking the star to that navigation of hope.)
The Burst (Nova): Encircling the star is a jagged outline, a bursting nova shape. This represents a new star on the horizon – or as I like to think of it, the explosion of joy and possibility that freedom brought. The flag’s creators describe it as a nova, meaning a new star born out of an explosion. For us, that nova is the light of a new beginning. Juneteenth was truly a rebirth for a people who had been long denied the right to be seen as human. The burst reminds me that out of the darkest history, something radiant emerged – a new chapter for Black Americans.
The Arc (Horizon): The sweeping red arc across the flag represents a new horizon, stretching across the sky. When I see that arc, I imagine the sun rising on June 19, 1865, illuminating an uncertain but promising future for the freed men and women. The arc underscores opportunity – a horizon that had been hidden from enslaved people, now coming into view. It signifies that from this moment onward, our destiny was our own. As a Black Detroiter, I connect this to the great migration journeys my ancestors took, leaving the South for industrial opportunities in the North – always chasing that new horizon of hope.
The Colors (Red, White, and Blue): Notably, the Juneteenth flag mirrors the red, white, and blue of the American flag. This was a very deliberate choice by Ben Haith. He wanted to show that we, the descendants of enslaved Africans, are fully American. The flag’s American colors announce that Black American Freedmen have as much claim to this nation and its ideals as anyone – a powerful statement, given that our ancestors built this country with forced labor. “For so long, our ancestors weren’t considered citizens… technically, they were citizens – just deprived of recognition,” Haith explains, underscoring why the flag uses the national colors. Every time I raise this flag, its colors affirm that we are America. Our blood, sweat, and tears are in this soil, our freedom is part of the American story, and we will not be written out of it.
Each symbol on the Juneteenth flag carries a piece of our collective memory – the star for Texas and national freedom, the nova for new beginnings, the arc for horizons to strive toward, and the patriotic colors to insist that Black Americans are not outsiders in our own homeland. Together, these elements proclaim the message of Juneteenth: a people once enslaved can seize freedom and stake their claim in the nation they transformed.
Red, White, and Blue, Not Red, Black, and Green
In recent years, I’ve noticed a troubling trend: well-meaning people and even big companies sometimes decorate Juneteenth materials in the red, black, and green of the Pan-African flag, or other Afro-Caribbean color schemes. Let me say this plainly: Juneteenth is not a Pan-African or Caribbean holiday – it is a distinctly American Freedmen holiday, and its symbols should reflect that. The Pan-African flag (also called the Black Liberation flag) was created in 1920 by Marcus Garvey as a unifying symbol for the African diaspora. Its colors have powerful meaning in a broad Black context – red for the blood of martyrs, black for the people, green for the land of Africa. I fly that flag with pride in other contexts. But it does not represent Juneteenth. In fact, using Pan-African colors for Juneteenth imagery risks erasing the specific history and identity of Black American Freedmen.
Why does this matter so much? Because our story is unique. Juneteenth marks the emancipation of enslaved African Americans in the United States. It is about the descendants of American slaves finally tasting liberty on American soil. When you swap in pan-African colors or Caribbean motifs, you unintentionally shift the narrative from this specific lineage and struggle to a more generalized “Black global” celebration. That does a disservice to the legacy of my ancestors. My great-grandmother in Alabama, or a Black Detroiter whose family fled Jim Crow Mississippi, were not part of a pan-African political movement – they were Freedmen living the reality of American racism and resistance. The red, white, and blue of our Juneteenth flag honors the fact that our ancestors built and bled for this country even while it enslaved them. It affirms that we claim America as ours. Replacing those colors with red-black-green is, in a way, writing us out of our own story – suggesting our freedom struggle was somehow generic or globally interchangeable.
I’ve had people ask, “Doesn’t using the U.S. flag colors celebrate the oppressor?” I hear the pain in that question. But as Ben Haith said, our people have fought in every American war, saluted the flag even when it didn’t salute us back, and poured our labor into making America a world power. The Juneteenth flag’s colors aren’t an ode to oppression; they’re a reclamation of our rightful place. They say: We are Americans, and this is our Independence Day, too. The Pan-African flag represents all people of African descent worldwide, which is beautiful in its own right – but Juneteenth honors a particular victory in American history. It belongs to Black American Freedmen – the sons and daughters of the Emancipation – and by extension to all who understand the value of that victory.
So I urge anyone commemorating Juneteenth: use the correct flag, with its correct colors. Educate those around you that our flag is red, white, and blue for a reason. When you see companies pushing Juneteenth T-shirts or flyers decked in Pan-African colors, call it out. It might seem like a small design choice, but symbolism matters. We’ve fought too long to have our narrative respected to see it blurred now. The integrity of Juneteenth’s symbols must be protected, just as the integrity of its history must be. This isn’t being petty about colors; it’s about guarding the truth of who we are and where we come from.
Honoring a Unique Legacy – A Call to Uplift Freedmen
My pride in being a Black American Freedman is intertwined with an acute awareness of how our community has been underserved and overlooked. We carry the legacy of enslaved labor that built white wealth, only to emerge from slavery with nothing in our hands. As Dr. Claud Anderson details in Black Labor, White Wealth, our people were systematically engineered into the lowest economic caste – like players in a rigged Monopoly game where we had no assets and others had a 400-year head start. Even after Emancipation, Black Americans faced Black Codes, Jim Crow segregation, redlining, and discrimination that stifled our economic growth. Here in Detroit, I see those scars in the form of decimated Black neighborhoods and the wealth gap that persists to this day.
Dr. Anderson’s work, including PowerNomics, teaches us that to uplift our people, we must know our unique history and claim our own economic and political agenda. A crucial part of that is rejecting any notion that we are simply “one minority among many” or just members of a vague African diaspora. When society tries to generalize us under broad labels – minorities, people of color, or even well-intentioned pan-Black unity slogans – it often results in what I call a gentle erasure. Our specific historical grievances (and entitlements) get lumped in with everyone else’s. The tragedy is, broad coalitions can sometimes leave Black Americans at the back of the line for justice. We’ve seen affirmative action and diversity programs meant to help descendants of slaves morph into diluted efforts that benefit other groups while our community remains economically at the bottom. Our identity and lineage are not interchangeable, and pretending otherwise only serves those who want to ignore the debt America still owes the descendants of its enslaved people.
Dr. Anderson coined the term “native Black Americans” to refer to Black people who descend from U.S. chattel slavery – a way to specifically identify our tribe within the broader African family. I embrace all people of African descent as my brothers and sisters, but I also insist that my lineage – the Black Freedmen of America – has its own story and its own legacy that must not be eclipsed. In PowerNomics, Anderson argues that Black Americans must build parallel economic strength and secure our group’s self-interest first, because no one else will do it for us. Part of securing our interest is preserving our narrative: Juneteenth is a perfect example. It’s our holiday, born from our struggle. When others attempt to universalize it without context, I feel the echoes of what Anderson describes as cultural and economic loss. We become background characters in what should be our starring role. I won’t let that happen – not on my watch, not in my community.
Protecting the Legacy
As the founder of a Black-owned brand in Detroit, I pour this consciousness into everything I do. My storefront displays the Juneteenth flag every June, in red, white, and blue glory, with the star and nova shining bright. It sparks conversations. Customers – Black and non-Black – ask about its design, and that gives me a chance to educate. I tell them about General Granger in Galveston, about my own great-grandma who was a little girl in 1865 and lived to see freedom. I tell them how this flag represents my ancestors’ fight and triumph, and why it must never be modified or forgotten. Many are surprised to learn there’s a Juneteenth flag at all – proof that our history “remains largely unknown to the wider public,” as the Smithsonian reminds us. That just lights a stronger fire in me to spread the knowledge.
This blog post is a call to protect, respect, and uplift the unique legacy of Black American Freedmen. If you are a fellow Freedman, I encourage you to stand tall in your identity – learn it, embrace it, teach it. Our story is the story of America’s climb toward its ideals. If you are not a Freedman but an ally or a member of the wider Black diaspora, I invite you to celebrate Juneteenth with us in its authentic form. Learn the history – the pain and the promise – and you’ll see it’s unlike any other. When you lift up Juneteenth in the correct colors and context, you are lifting up the triumph of a people who fought from within the belly of America to make her live up to “liberty and justice for all.”
In Detroit, we have a saying that our roots run deep. The Black community here was fed by the Great Migration, by Freedmen fleeing oppression down South to forge a better life in the Motor City. We built Motown; we powered the factories; we ignited social movements. We are the children of Juneteenth, even if our families didn’t call it that back then. And now it’s on us to ensure the meaning of Juneteenth isn’t co-opted or watered down.
This year on Juneteenth, I’ll be raising the flag high at my business and in my heart. I’ll think of those 250,000 in Texas who tasted freedom last – and of how their joy reverberated to free a nation. I’ll think of the red in the flag as the blood our forebears shed, the white as the pure light of justice, the blue as the American sky we all live under. I’ll say a prayer of thanks that our people never gave up, and a prayer of determination that we never let their legacy be erased. Juneteenth is more than a celebration – it’s a charge to remember who we are, where we came from, and what is owed. It’s about identity, resistance, and pride. And as long as I draw breath, I will honor it in first person, in living color – red, white, and blue – telling anyone who’ll listen: This is our flag. This is our freedom. This is our story.
Happy Juneteenth. Long live the legacy of Black American Freedmen.
Sources:
National Museum of African American History & Culture – The Historical Legacy of Juneteenth
American Battlefield Trust – 10 Facts: Juneteenth
Oprah Daily – What the Juneteenth Flag Means
Capital B News – Meet Ben Haith, the Man Behind the Juneteenth Flag
PowerNomics Corporation – Black Labor, White Wealth (Anderson, 1994)
