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Although Juneteenth has been celebrated by African Americans for nearly 160 years, it is only the third year the nation is officially pausing to recognize the significance of the day. Polls show that Americans' knowledge about Juneteenth shot up following passage of the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act, along with an increase in the share of people who want schools to teach about the day, and who agree it should be a federal holiday. The lesson for the country is that more focus should be placed on unearthing untold stories about people of color to enable racial healing and a more equitable future for all.
According to polling by Gallup, in 2021, less than four in 10 Americans knew that Juneteenth is a celebration of the day when our government informed enslaved people in Texas they were free. The proportion increased to six in 10 the year after Juneteenth became a federal holiday—a full 88 percent of the thousands who responded to Gallup's survey. Accompanying that change, the percentage of Americans who said they wanted public schools to teach about the day increased to 63 percent from less than 50 percent the year before.
That is a remarkable shift in the right direction for a society that has relegated people of color to second class citizenship for centuries. It is also a hopeful indication that Americans may be more open to supporting the repair of systemic racism's harms once they better understand how inequity today is a direct consequence of a deeply unjust past.
Legal scholar and MacArthur Fellow, Thomas Wilson Mitchell, has proven enormous positive change is possible when untold stories about the impact of racism are unearthed. In a series of articles examining Black landownership and land loss in America over the past two centuries, he documented a long pattern of involuntary land loss Black people and disadvantaged Americans experience because of draconian heirs' property laws.
His efforts to address the laws, with billions in real estate wealth at stake, were bolstered following a national news story on Black land loss which catalyzed broader awareness of the problem. Today, the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act of 2010, which Mitchell drafted, enables more families to avoid involuntary and predatory disposition of their real estate. The law has been enacted in 21 states, the District of Columbia, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. It has been introduced in five other states.
Another MacArthur Fellow, Monica Muñoz Martinez, is helping foster racial healing by bringing long-obscured cases of racial violence along the Texas-Mexico border to light. She wrote a book, The Injustice Never Leaves You, chronicling a brutal period of American history, in which hundreds of Mexicans and Mexican Americans were lynched and massacred by Anglo-American vigilantes and law enforcement officers, and the transgenerational trauma it created. A nonprofit she co-founded, Refusing to Forget, is on a mission to spread awareness about these stories. Muñoz Martinez is also building a digital archive—Mapping Violence—that will enable scholars and the general public to learn about racial violence in Texas between 1900-1930.
Her work calls attention to distorted views of Texas' past and highlights the ways that legacies of dehumanizing violence reverberate in the present. Muñoz Martinez's work also elevates the stories of Mexican and Mexican American-led social justice movements that emerged to fight the harm, further driving racial healing by emphasizing the humanity of the oppressed.
At the MacArthur Foundation, we believe unearthing hidden stories is a crucial undertaking in the effort to advance racial healing and repair. Inequity persists, in part, because too much storytelling about our past has been overlooked and undervalued. That is why as a part of our Equitable Recovery grantmaking we dedicated over $20 million to support reparations and racial healing initiatives. The Global Circle for Reparations and Healing is one of the organizations guiding the way and calling on global, federal, state, and local governments, universities, companies and philanthropies to play a role in positioning reparations and racial healing as an issue that can be meaningfully addressed. And, Edgar Villanueva's Decolonizing Wealth Project—which brings truth, reconciliation, and healing to communities most affected by the legacy of colonization through racial healing and narrative change work—is committing millions over five years to bolster support for reparations campaigns and map projects across the country.
My hope this Juneteenth is that we can continue the deep and necessary work to better understand how slavery, colonialism, and racism interact and impact the lives of people of color across the world and are critical to making the case for reparations, restoring dignity, and fostering racial healing.
John Palfrey is president of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
