Happy Juneteenth! One thing I want to emphasize here is that the Civil War created a major refugee crisis on American soil. We need to talk more about contraband camps. Black people did not go from enslaved to free smoothly. The transition was incredibly difficult and poorly cared for by the government. In fact, thousands of Black people died of disease and starvation in the camps. They had no food, no medicines, no money, they had no education, and were put to work by the Union Army, farming, washing and sewing uniforms, etc. This on top of the fact that families had been separated from each other when sold by enslavers and further separated by war. It was a desperate time. I think this is why so much information was lost. The depth of the trauma was astounding. People wanted to celebrate freedom, but didn’t necessarily want to talk about their past. So reclaiming individual family stories continues to be a difficult process. It is a secondary pain - the pain of loss of connection to our motherland compounded by the pain of disconnection to our individual ancestral stories via the trauma of slavery. But Juneteenth is a day of reclamation. We celebrate what we do have - we have each other, we have our shared past, however much may still be in shadows, and we have always taken so much pride and joy in the freedom we have today. We are a people who have done so much with so little, and who take nothing for granted. #juneteenth #emancipationday #blm #freedomday #juneteenthcelebration #blackhistory #americanhistory #civilwarhistory #refugees #celebratefreedom