Holidays allow us, even require us, to tell our stories. We think we know the stories. But to tell them every year sets them into a new context, and renews understanding and identity.
Telling those stories are the first thing dictators like to take away from us, if they don’t support the dictator’s vision of a society upholding his power. This is why Trump ordered plaques removed at the Smithsonian museums and at National Parks that mention slavery, Native Americans, or climate change, for example. (A judge just ordered the National Parks plaques returned for display.)
This Juneteenth, I’m thinking of a dance performance I saw recently, mostly to do with Irish traditional dancing, but also including a couple of other styles. It was based on a series of interviews with 13 lifelong dancers, conducted by Irish stepdancers Jackie O’Riley and Rebecca McGowan. The project was called “When the Music Starts, I’ll Know.”
One of the dancers interviewed, the jazz dancer, teacher and choreographer Adrienne Hawkins, had few elements of her story that stood out from the stories of the others. All of the dancers committed themselves to their love of dance, and through community and hard work, overcame obstacles to creating a life in dance, whether as professionals or amateurs.
But one element of Adrienne’s story was different. She’s black, and when she went to a predominantly white high school, the counselor basically said she was too dumb to take a college prep course, until her mother came to school and wouldn’t take No for an answer.
Hawkins grew up an athletic child who loved to dance. Her brother was so athletic that he got a scholarship to play football in college and was then pursued by both the New York Jets and the Philadelphia Eagles. The Jets informed him that they couldn’t sign him unless he got rid of his white girlfriend; apparently, that was deemed a bad look for the team. So he signed with the Eagles and included in his contract that some of his fees would cover his sister Adrienne’s college tuition.
Let’s stop right there. Many people have obstacles in their lives, but how many have this kind of existential resistance to their ability to get anywhere at all? The answer is: many, even if such details are rarely shared. While there are many forms of prejudice affecting lots of people, racism has always added a particularly forbidding ceiling to people’s dreams.
We’ve come a long ways since 1863, when Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation ended American slavery. The decree did not fully take effect for a while, because southerners were fighting for the right to suppress and enslave black people. (Revisionists, including stories like Gone With the Wind, tried to repaint that effort as having to do with “states’ rights” but that is not supported by history.)
The final chapter for the Emancipation Proclamation arrived on June 19, 1865, when a Union general ordered its enforcement in Texas. The official, legal end to American slavery occurred six months later when the 13th Amendment was ratified, but the anniversary of Juneteenth was celebrated starting the following year in Texas, and spread slowly to the rest of the South and finally, the rest of the country.
Since then, there have been vast improvements in civil rights, and major setbacks as well, including current efforts by the Trump administration to sanitize the story of slavery, and the radical right Supreme Court’s decisions to gut the voting rights act. So this year’s Juneteenth tells a similar story to last year’s, but in a new context.
In 1980, Texas was the first state to recognize Juneteenth as a paid state holiday, and many other states followed suit. Proposals for a national “Juneteenth Independence Day” were introduced in Congress in 1996, and finally became law in 2021. Donald Trump scaled back government recognition of the holiday in 2025 as part of his battle against any recognition of, or efforts to improve, diversity, equity and inclusion in the U.S.
You may be interested in my article about the ways in which music teaches culture, which includes a discussion of how Henry Ford created a “music department” in his company. His goal was to spread the myth that true American music is rural and white, which has had strong impacts on players and recording companies for over a century — just one of the reasons that Hitler hung a portrait of Ford in his office.
Meanwhile, let’s celebrate Juneteenth and continue to tell its story! My site at fiddle-online always presents a special Juneteenth home page for a day or two, with a link to an article about the prevalence of black fiddlers in America ever since the 18th century.
Enjoy the recording below of Eddie South playing Fritz Kreisler’s “Preludium and Allegro,” a popular and challenging classical violin piece with theme and variations. Eddie South (1904-1962) was a classical violinist trained in Budapest, Paris, and Chicago, but because he was black, he wasn’t allowed into any symphonies. Instead, he got into performing jazz violin. In this recording, he not only plays the Kreisler piece but runs circles around it by improvising on it as well.