What is Juneteenth? The meaning behind the June 19 federal holiday
Juneteenth commemorates June 19, 1865. That was when Union General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, and announced that over 250,000 enslaved people were free, more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued by President Abraham Lincoln and declared slaves in Confederate states were free. Originally celebrated by newly freed Black communities in Texas with religious services, barbecues and symbolic traditions like discarding clothing worn during enslavement, the holiday has since grown beyond Texas and the South.
Though festivities resurfaced in Black communities during the 1960s Civil Rights Movement as a way to honor their legacy, the holiday — sometimes referred to by other names such as 'Second Independence Day,' 'Freedom Day,' 'Emancipation Day' or 'Black Fourth of July' — gained national attention once again during the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement. The movement inspired Congress and Biden to create an official federal holiday to honor Juneteenth the following year.
Modern Juneteenth festivities are vibrant and celebratory, and typically involve outdoor activities like cookouts and picnics. Large community events are also held: Last year, the White House hosted a concert on the South Lawn for Juneteenth and Black Music Month. This year, Juneteenth events across the country include things like film screenings, festivals, concerts and other community cultural events.
In an opinion piece for the Arizona Republic, Greg Moore wrote, 'It's a good time to find a community of people and celebrate the racial progress we've made over the last few decades…And given all the separation Black Americans have faced through history, it would be fitting to celebrate in a community gathering — the bigger, the better.'
Some people may prefer to use Juneteenth as a day of reflection, education and remembrance. That could include going to a museum, some of which are hosting special programs for the holiday on Black American history. The National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tenn., is marking Juneteenth with free admission and educational activities for families.
This year, many Juneteenth events have been scaled back or canceled because companies and local governments are cutting funding for diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.
You can honor Juneteenth even if you are not Black, Karida Brown, a sociology professor at Emory University, told the Associated Press. Brown explained that the history of slavery in America is all of our history, and it's important to recognize 'the good, the bad, the ugly, the story of emancipation and freedom for your Black brothers and sisters under the Constitution of the law.'
However, Moore wrote in the Arizona Republic that it's important not to let Juneteenth go the way of holidays like Cinco de Mayo, in which cultures are reduced to harmful stereotypes. He's afraid Black culture can be 'warped beyond recognition' during disrespectful celebrations. 'There shouldn't be any blackface or watermelon jokes,' he said.
While red, green and black are colors associated with Juneteenth — those are the colors of the pan-African flag, which represents the African diaspora and the unity of Black people — the Juneteenth flag is red, white and blue. It was created in 1997 by community organizer and activist Ben 'Boston Ben' Haith in order to give the holiday a unifying symbol.
'For so long, our ancestors weren't considered citizens of this country,' Haith said in an interview with Capital B. 'But realistically, and technically, they were citizens. They just were deprived of being recognized as citizens. So I thought it was important that the colors portray red, white, and blue, which we see in the American flag.'
The star in the center stands for two things: Texas, where Juneteenth began, and, according to Haith, the white burst around the star symbolizes a new star being born — representing a new beginning for Black Americans. The red arc below it represents a horizon, signifying progress and hope for the future.
While Juneteenth is now a federal holiday, people employed in the private sector are not legally required to recognize or observe the holiday. In turn, privately owned shops, restaurants, grocery stores and other retail businesses will likely keep normal hours on the holiday unless they choose to honor the holiday in some way.
Most major banks, as well as the stock market, are closed on Juneteenth. So is the post office and other federal offices. Public schools and libraries are typically closed as well.
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Hypebeast
an hour ago
- Hypebeast
Visionary Painter Raymond Saunders Dies at 90
Summary Raymond Saunders, the radical American artist known for his radical approach to abstraction and assemblage, passed away at the page of 90. His death was confirmed in a joint statement co-published by his representing galleries — Casemore, Andrew Kreps and David Zwirner — earlier this week. Saunders' oeuvre is defined by his resistance to categorization. Through texture, symbolism and material he challenged the viewer to reconsider assumptions about Black identity and cultural expression. In his assemblage-style artworks gestural brushwork sits beside vibrant color fields, notational markings and found objects, and served as a means of interrogating the dense fabric of American history. News of his passing follows the recent close ofFlowers from a Black Gardenat the Carnegie Museum of Art, where he took art classes growing up. The exhibition marked the first major museum retrospective for the two-time National Endowment for the Arts Awards recipient. Born in Pittsburgh in 1934, Saunders received a BFA from Carnegie Institute of Technology, and later moved to Oakland to pursue an MFA the California College of Arts and Crafts, where he became a professor. Saunders leaves behind a legacy of fearless experimentation through bodies of work that bolsters the autonomy and expansivity of Black artisthood. In his 1967 essayBlack Is a Colorhe wrote: 'i'm not here to play to the gallery i am not responsible for anyone's entertainment. i am responsible for being as fully myself, as man and artist, as i possibly can be, while allowing myself to hope that in the effort some light, some love, some beauty may be shed upon the world, and perhaps some inequities put right.'
Los Angeles Times
7 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
A Times investigation: As west Altadena burned, L.A. County fire trucks stayed elsewhere
West Altadena was burning, and no one was there to save it. More than 40 Los Angeles County fire trucks surrounded the Palisades fire, where an inferno was entering its 17th hour. An additional 64 fire trucks fanned out across east Altadena and neighboring areas, battling a blaze that had sparked in Eaton Canyon nine hours earlier. But in west Altadena — where thousands of structures would burn and all but one of the 19 deaths from the Eaton fire would occur — there was just one county fire truck as the flames spread at 3:08 a.m. on Jan. 8, according to automatic vehicle locator data obtained by The Times. 'We were abandoned,' said Sofia Vidal, 57, one of more than a dozen residents interviewed by The Times who said they stayed dousing flames through the night with no firefighters in sight. 'I never heard a siren.' Six months after the fire, the anger is palpable, with residents of the racially diverse unincorporated area, long a refuge for Black families, convinced that they suffered from weaker fire protection than whiter, wealthier areas near the Palisades fire. The sense of neglect is so intense that nearly 1 in 5 residents believes the county Fire Department let the town burn on purpose, according to an Altadena-based public interest research firm that interviewed more than 1,200 residents. 'Am I grateful for firemen? Not at all,' said Vidal, who fled her home with her husband at 5:45 a.m. after burning squirrels began to fall from their palm tree. 'Did they fail me miserably? Absolutely.' The L.A. County Fire Department's top brass has described the destruction in west Altadena as almost inevitable. The wind was too intense. The flames were too violent. The whole night, unprecedented. But the vehicle locator data, which show that most county fire trucks didn't shift into west Altadena until long after it was ravaged by fire, complicate the narrative. How much could have been saved, residents wonder, if firefighters focused on their neighborhood instead? L.A. County Fire Chief Anthony Marrone said the lack of fire trucks in west Altadena probably boiled down to 'human error' by fire officials who decided where the trucks should move. Those officials — from the county as well as other agencies — were part of the 'unified incident command' stationed for most of the fire at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. 'Why didn't we do a better job of dividing resources between east and west Altadena, right? That's a fair question,' Marrone said. 'What was going on? What were the people doing? 'Did people who were working west not accurately communicate the dire circumstances that they were faced with?' said Marrone, who said he was at the Rose Bowl that night pleading with agencies across the region to send more trucks to the Eaton fire. 'Or was there a lack of resources? Or were both sides of the fire equally challenging? ... I don't know which one of those it is. It's probably a little bit of all of that.' Marrone said it's possible that other fire agencies sent vehicles to focus on west Altadena, but his department didn't track their locations. The cascade of events leading to the tragedy in west Altadena began when the Los Angeles Fire Department failed to pre-deploy fire trucks to Pacific Palisades amid dire wind warnings, forcing the county to pitch in. But west Altadena suffered from more than being the last place to catch fire in a day full of infernos. The vehicle locator data, according to some former L.A. city and county fire officials, point to a failure within the incident command coordinating the county's response, led that night by Deputy Fire Chiefs Eleni Pappas and Albert Yanagisawa. A growing fire is broken up into divisions, with supervisors — often battalion chiefs — communicating the fire conditions in their divisions up the chain to incident commanders, who use the information to decide where to position fire trucks. Incident commanders, the former officials said, should pay attention to the 'big picture' — not just where flames are raging, but where they're headed. That means sending fire patrols — vehicles equipped with a pump, hose and water — to nearby neighborhoods to spot whether the fire has jumped with the wind. And it means quickly repositioning firefighters from the biggest eruption to small but growing ones, where they may have more impact. Only one county fire patrol stopped west of Lake Avenue, the dividing line between east and west Altadena, during the first 12 hours of the Eaton fire, the vehicle locator data show, with assistant and battalion chiefs staying out of the heart of the neighborhood. Most county fire trucks didn't move from the Eaton Canyon area, where the fire first erupted, until west Altadena was well on its way to burning to the ground. Yanagisawa said incident commanders 'did their very best' to battle a fire that dramatically outpaced their resources, with hurricane-force winds pushing the flames in different directions throughout the night. But a former Los Angeles Fire Department incident commander said the data showed that too many firefighters were deployed like 'moths to a candle,' directed to swarm the flames immediately in front of them. 'Nobody stood back and looked at the big picture,' said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss another agency's operations. 'It takes leadership and situational awareness to direct that as an incident commander and say, 'Hey guys, I understand you guys are fighting fire there. I don't need you there. Based on the map, weather, rate of fire spread and 911 calls we're getting, I need you to defend homes and evacuation in this other community.'' The automatic vehicle locator data, which The Times obtained through a public records request, track L.A. County Fire Department vehicles responding to the Palisades and Eaton fires on a minute-to-minute basis. The Times used the GPS coordinates to pinpoint every time a truck stopped. Fire trucks from the roughly 20 other agencies responding to the Eaton fire, such as the U.S. Forest Service and the Pasadena Fire Department, were not captured in the data, nor were county trucks that didn't have a vehicle locator system or whose system was not working. County officials said there could also be gaps in the data caused by disruptions in cell service. The Times has requested, but not received, vehicle locator data for some of the other agencies. The data provide a possible explanation for one of county officials' key failures. Residents west of Lake Avenue did not get an evacuation order until 3:25 a.m. Jan. 8 — more than four hours after flames were first reported in the area. East Altadenans got their first evacuation order at 6:40 p.m. Jan 7. Some former fire officials said the data suggest that firefighters may not have known of the embers flying into western neighborhoods. Ferocious winds grounded a county helicopter over Eaton Canyon almost immediately, leaving no bird's-eye view. On the ground, county fire trucks were focused almost entirely east of Lake. No county fire vehicles responded to the 911 calls trickling in from west Altadena early in the night, according to the data, though it's possible other agencies did. The county has hired the consulting firm McChrystal Group to investigate what went awry with the evacuation orders. The county Sheriff's Department and the county Fire Department, which both had first responders in Altadena that night, have said they shared responsibility for ordering evacuations. A spokesperson for the Sheriff's Department did not respond to an inquiry about where deputy vehicles were that night, and the agency has not fulfilled a request for vehicle locator data. While homes near the foothills around Eaton Canyon were mostly unscathed by flames, most of west Altadena was destroyed. Thousands of structures were lost. Eighteen people died there — the vast majority on blocks where a county fire truck never stopped. One additional victim perished just east of Lake Avenue. On West Terrace Street, despite three 911 calls, no aid came for Anthony Mitchell Sr., a 68-year-old amputee, and his son, who had cerebral palsy. On Monterosa Drive, Victor Shaw, 66, died fighting the flames with a garden hose after a neighbor called 911. On Tonia Avenue, Erliene Kelley, 83, died after calling 911 twice. Her son, Trevor Kelley, tried to rescue her around 6 a.m., inching through oily black smoke too thick for his truck's high beams to penetrate. He said he understood why no firefighters attempted it. 'The only reason why I went is because of my mom and pure adrenaline, but I can see that it would be impossible for them,' said Kelley, 59, who arrived to find his mother's home burned to the ground. 'They would actually be committing suicide.' The county started the day with firefighters to spare. Marrone, responsible for fire protection across unincorporated parts of L.A. County as well as roughly 60 cities, extended the shift of firefighters about to go home the morning of Jan. 7, leaving him with 1,800 on hand. Later in the evening, he ordered 50 strike teams from the state, bringing an additional 250 vehicles into the fray. When sparks ignited near Pacific Palisades around 10:30 a.m., county fire trucks raced to help the Los Angeles Fire Department, which had been caught flat-footed after staffing a fraction of its available vehicles. In a day full of failures, the city's staffing decision, experts said, was the original sin, creating a 'domino effect' that hamstrung the county's response to fires in its own territory. 'They pretty much used up their extra people to assist L.A. city,' said Rick Crawford, a former LAFD battalion chief who reviewed The Times' vehicle locator analysis. By 6:15 p.m., according to the data, the county had sent 47 fire trucks and more than 40 other vehicles to the Palisades fire. More than one-third were in Pacific Palisades — an area the city Fire Department is responsible for. With the fire still raging across the Santa Monica Mountains, those trucks stayed put when flames erupted in Eaton Canyon at 6:18 p.m., about 40 miles away. New county fire trucks flooded the canyon area to fight what would become the most hellish blaze of the day, with hurricane-force winds scattering embers in every direction. Trucks soon moved into the eastern reaches of Altadena and small pockets of Pasadena before fanning east into Kinneloa Mesa, Sierra Madre and Pasadena's Hasting Ranch neighborhood, the data show. Firefighters said they met pure chaos on every corner — residents in wheelchairs desperate to escape nursing facilities, residents begging for their families to be saved. With lives still at risk, some county fire leaders said, it may not have made sense to divert to the west. 'We did not have enough people to shift in masses from one area of Altadena to another,' said Dave Gillotte, head of the county firefighters union. 'The story very well could be, why did fire engines leave the area where we had people still trapped?' A little after 10 p.m., some county fire trucks headed toward Sylmar after reports of a third fast-moving blaze came in from the San Fernando Valley. 'You can't just say, 'I'm not sending anybody to the Hurst fire — let it burn,''' Marrone said. Marrone said he has not conducted an analysis of fire truck locations because the state has hired the Fire Safety Research Institute to do an independent review of the overall fire response. He cautioned that the vehicle locator data show only a partial picture, because they don't include dozens of trucks from other agencies. The California Governor's Office of Emergency Services, for example, sent 68 fire trucks during the first 12 hours of the Eaton fire but did not have locator information available for them. The Pasadena Fire Department had 12 trucks at the Eaton fire that night, in addition to patrols, but couldn't say how much time they spent in Altadena, according to Chief Chad Augustin. The unified incident command was led that night by the county, along with the U.S. Forest Service, the L.A. County Sheriff's Department and several other nearby fire agencies. Marrone said that with his firefighters overwhelmed in the east, other agencies that came on scene later should have helped in west Altadena. 'I don't agree that it's L.A. County's responsibility to make sure we go into west Altadena,' he said. 'I'm not going to allow L.A. County Fire or the men and women of my department to take this on the chin as, 'Oh, the Eaton fire failure, the Eaton fire deaths, were solely the responsibility of Chief Marrone and his men and women.' No, in my mind, that can't be farther from the truth.' As firefighters battled three raging blazes across the county on Jan. 7, 911 dispatchers got the first clear sign at 10:50 p.m. that flying embers were threatening homes west of Lake Avenue. A 911 caller reported a flaming roof on East Calaveras Street. Two more calls from the street followed. By 3:25 a.m., when the first evacuation order for the area went out, 911 dispatchers had received 17 reports of fire from homes west of Lake Avenue. No county fire trucks responded to those homes, according to the data. 'Where these calls come in, they've got to assign somebody right away. 'Hey, yeah, we got reports of this fire jumping Lake Avenue. What's going on? Any engines over there?'' said a former L.A. County fire captain who reviewed The Times' analysis and requested anonymity to speak candidly about his former employer's response. 'We're taught to not grow roots, so to speak, in any one area — you've got to move.' Marrone said the addresses from the 911 calls should have all been relayed to the unified incident command. It's possible, he said, that commanders sent fire trucks from other agencies to those calls, which wouldn't have been reflected in the data. Soon, west Altadena was a hellscape. Dispatchers were fielding a deluge of 911 calls, many from residents trapped inside burning homes. 'I begged them to come. I imagine they have me on tape — I was crying when I said it. My life was going before my eyes,' said Daniel MacPherson, 70, who called 911 around 5 a.m. after the smoke grew so thick he couldn't see his hand. 'They said, 'We're busy.'' He escaped as his neighbors' home was engulfed in flames. Kim Winiecki, 77, and Evelyn McClendon, 59, didn't make it out. After the 3:25 a.m. evacuation order, some county fire trucks moved into west Altadena, but most stayed east, according to the vehicle locator data, even as the blaze worsened in the west. Between 5:30 and 6 a.m., 42 trucks made stops around the Eaton fire, but just seven of them in west Altadena. The number of fire trucks in the area gradually increased through the afternoon, the data show, though homes continued to burn throughout the day. Sylvie Andrews, 45, returned to her home around 11 a.m. after the winds had calmed — just in time to watch it go up in flames. 'It was fightable, and they were not fighting at all,' said Andrews, who said she was sympathetic to the difficulty of saving homes at the fire's peak but couldn't understand why she lost everything later in the morning. Many Altadena residents don't need data to be convinced that their homes probably burned with no fire trucks around. The marquee at a local Catholic school was vandalized to read: 'FIRE DEPARTMENT WTF.' Neighbors joke about defending their street with a 'bucket brigade.' 'Citizens with garden hoses — those are the only people who fought the fire,' said Steven Lamb, who said he spent the night pacing his street with his hose, battling flaming palm fronds and embers the size of baseballs. Lamb, a residential designer, said sheriff's deputies forced him to evacuate at 10:30 a.m. He turned on the news at 2 p.m. to see his house had burned to the ground. At 67 years old, he's now living with his wife in his childhood bedroom in his mother's home. Shawna Dawson Beer, who runs a popular Facebook group for Altadenans, described residents as in 'pitchfork mode.' 'I did not think there was any universe where it would be possible to turn a community against beloved first responders — this is it,' said Dawson Beer, 51. 'We were left to burn.'
Los Angeles Times
a day ago
- Los Angeles Times
LAUSD test scores hit a new high, erasing pandemic lows with a second year of strong gains
Los Angeles schools Supt. Alberto Carvalho delivers his opening-of-schools address at Disney Concert Hall in 2023. He gives his updated annual report at the concert hall on Tuesday. After years of struggling to recover from deep pandemic setbacks, Los Angeles Unified students have achieved a 'new high watermark,' with math and English scores rising across all tested grades for the second straight year, surpassing results from before the 2020 campus closures, Supt. Alberto Carvalho said. Two years of incremental gains at every tested grade level is generally considered solid evidence that instruction is moving in the right direction, said Carvalho along with education experts. 'The coolest thing is that the district, despite all that this community went through, has now reached the highest-ever performance at all levels in English language arts and math,' Carvalho said in an interview with The Times. He is to announce the results Tuesday during his annual address to administrators and guests at Disney Concert Hall. Advertisement 'We didn't just take it back to pre-pandemic levels. We exceeded pre-pandemic levels of performance,' he said to The Times. 'We established a new high watermark.' Morgan Scott Polikoff, a professor at USC's Rossier School of Education described the gains as 'indeed impressive and seem to have, in most cases, more than erased losses attributable to the pandemic ... This is an important development and the district should be proud of it.' Nonetheless, overall results show that achievement — as measured by test scores — in the nation's second-largest school system remains a work-in-progress. Advertisement 'Large proportions of students in the district, especially students from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups, are still performing below state standard,' Polikoff said. In total, 46.5% of students met or exceeded grade level standards in English Language Arts in tests conducted in April and May. In math, the figure was 36.7%. The overall numbers indicate that nearly two in three students are not meeting the math standards for their grade in the school system of about 400,000 students. Brights spots in the scores But scores look better in the details. In math, for example, scores rose 3.92 percentage points, a strong gain for one year. Last year, the gain was 2.3 percentage points — also a solid gain — bringing L.A. Unified, at the time, to within 2.7 points of the entire state. It's possible that L.A. Unified overtook the state average this year in math — although statewide data has yet to be released. Advertisement This year's gains appeared to be across the board — reaching students with disabilities, students from low-income families, Latino students and Black students. As a group, Black students rose at least four percentage points in both English and math. Nonetheless, three in four Black students still are not achieving grade-level standards in math. The number is better but still low for reading, with 36% of Black students meeting or exceeding the state standards for their grade. In its preliminary release of data, the district did not include scores for white and Asian students, so it was not possible to evaluate the extent to which the district is closing the achievement gap between these students and Black and Latino students. The gap remained substantial last year. Data from this parameter would be important to examine, said UC Berkeley emeritus professor of education Bruce Fuller. All the same, 'this post-COVID bounceback in student learning is quicker and reaching higher levels than observed in most school districts across the state.' Fuller also attributed success to the district's long-term efforts — scores had been gradually improving before the pandemic. Advertisement 'Public schools have successfully lifted the education attainment of Angeleno parents in recent decades, which helps explain their children's stronger success in school,' he said. Carvalho told The Times that the most recent scores — which reflect tests taken in the spring — were especially impressive in context. In anticipating the results, 'I had fear in my heart to a certain extent,' he said. 'You know the disruptions. We had to shut down the system because of the inclement conditions, some of it weather, but some of it smoke, ash and all that as a result of fires. And then the immigration raids. The stress. The fears.' 'This was a year without precedent for us,' he said. The longest disruption was in March 2020, when L.A. Unified campuses were shut down for more than a year during the pandemic, forcing classes online. That long-running public health emergency — during a time of job losses, disease and higher death rates — demonstrably drove down student performance on the standardized tests. Carvalho became superintendent in February of 2022. During the more recent crises, students and staff have largely soldiered through with better outcomes. A slide prepared for Carvalho's Disney Hall presentation touted the gains as the 'Highest-Ever Achievement.' Advertisement What that means is that, overall, L.A. Unified has never performed better as measured by the current state testing system, which began collecting data in 2015. L.A. Unified also had not previously improved across all grades for two years in a row, district officials said, during the 11 years of the current testing regime. Students are tested in grades 3 through 8 and grade 11 in English and math. In science, student are tested in grades 5 and 8, and once during high school. In these relatively new science tests, scores remain especially low, although they improved. Overall, 27.3% of students met the state standards in science. What contributed to the gains The testing rebound was helped by record levels of state and federal funding to cope with the harms of the pandemic. Carvalho, whose contract expires next February, said that the district used the one-time money effectively and, although it is gone, the system in place should continue to build on the academic gains. He listed a number of key initiatives as contributing to gains, such as giving more resources and applying more oversight to schools and groups of students that needed more help. He also cited better data and an ability to use it faster to tailor instruction. Tutoring — before, during and after school, and in-person and online — was a central strategy. So was increasing classroom instructional time by promoting summer school and offering mini-academies during winter and spring break, he said. Advertisement Intervention teachers were deployed to work with small groups of students and coaches helped refine teaching. Some of these efforts pre-dated Carvalho's arrival from Miami, where he had been the longtime superintendent. Challenges ahead The challenges ahead involve more than improving the quality and pace of learning. 'One of my biggest concerns is really the unpredictability of the moment in which we live, the instability of funding, but also the unpredictability and instability of policy that influences public education,' Carvalho said. California Revised LAUSD budget saves jobs today, trims future retiree health benefit contributions The L.A. school board approved an $18.8 billion budget that postpones layoffs for a year and does not cut services to students. But future years may looking much different. The U.S. Supreme Court recently cleared the path for massive layoffs at the U.S. Department of Education, as one example. 'What does that really mean in terms of at the local level for a student?' Carvalho said. In addition, enrollment has declined steadily for about 20 years. Ongoing immigration enforcement could accelerate that trend, Carvalho said. 'We have a very large number of immigrant students, or students who are children of immigrant parents with mixed status,' Carvalho said. 'I have to believe, based on stories I read and reports that I watch, that there will be families, unfortunately, in our community, who have made a decision to self -deport with their children.'
