Opinion: Now that it's a national holiday, Juneteenth needs to retain the historic textures of long-held local observances

NYT illustration by Noel Spiva, photos by Getty Images

Historian and author Tiya Miles shares childhood memories of her family's Juneteenth celebrations before the day became a national holiday. She draws from Montana's rich Black history for an insightful reframing of how the holiday could be nationally celebrated without commercial gimmicks. A condensed version of her New York Times opinion piece is below. The full version is here.

The signing of the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act into law in 2021 was an expression of real progress in the collective understanding of the Black struggle that reinforced our national ideals of liberty and dignity. But I confess my ambivalence. I am worried about what official national recognition might do to what has always been a community-based holiday.

My own memories of Juneteenth, like those of so many others, are distinctly local. They are rooted in a sense of place. When I was young, that place was Eden Park, high on the hills along the Ohio River in Cincinnati, where I would spend the day contentedly with my mother and the many other families who attended. Years later, after I formed a family of my own with my spouse (who is not Black or Midwestern, but Native American from Montana), I discovered where Juneteenth events were held, who organized them and who turned out was like holding a black light to the invisible-inked map of the present and past African American community.

Juneteenth festivities have long represented tucked-away spaces, deeply local, somewhat surprising and fitted to the variances of Black life in America. They have supported micro-cultures of Black crafts and local economies of neighborhood enterprise, fostering the kind of community exchange that will be most sustainable in the future. Whether they are rural or urban, their local specificity, and their hiddenness from those who would misunderstand their gravity, have made Juneteenth events special and enduring.

Montana is largely imagined by the rest of the country as a white place, with only a glancing acknowledgment of its significant Indigenous populations and histories. But it has a long and complex Black history, which has only recently been reconstructed through a multimedia project of the Montana Historical Society. A handful of Black fur traders crossed into the Rocky Mountain West in the mid-19th century, but most African Americans migrated to Montana after the Civil War. . . . As the Black population grew in Montana in the late 19th century and early 20th century, tens of thousands of people formed communities in or near cities such as Havre, Great Falls, Butte and Helena. African American residents in the city of Butte celebrated Emancipation Day with a pilgrimage by train into the snow-peaked mountains, where they enjoyed picnics, fun and frivolities.

For the second year in a row, the Montana Historical Society, in partnership with the Holter Museum of Art and the Myrna Loy Theater, will host a free Juneteenth festival, drawing on a local history of diversity and perseverance. Based in Helena, these activities include a trolley ride (reminiscent of those Butte train rides more than a century ago), a tour of Black historic sites, and a documentary about a cross-country journey by Black soldiers of the 25th Infantry in 1897 to test whether bicycles could replace horses.

Juneteenth celebrations mounted by groups on the ground grow out of these rich histories, help us to recognize them and illuminate pathways toward greater understanding and connection where people live, work and visit. But the day's new national recognition has brought a level of commercialization that threatens to eclipse these local celebrations in all their wondrous specificity. Today we can find Juneteenth T-shirts aplenty at Walmart, a Juneteenth makeup sale courtesy of an online boutique and apparel on Etsy boasting the ironic claim 'Culture Not for Sale' in Kwanzaa colors. In just two years, we've already seen examples of how this kind of rapid commercialization can go awry. In 2021, Target had to admit that a Juneteenth display of hot sauce, Kool-Aid and watermelon 'missed the mark.'. . . When we allow corporations and distant event planners to hijack Juneteenth, we lose the texture of these various places and their particular commemorations. We share the responsibility to prevent that.

With care and concerted effort, the Juneteenth holiday might rival Thanksgiving as a new communal ritual, highlighting the value of shared freedoms as our workweek tempo slows and personal rhythms align, even as we notice and cherish the treasure of each distinct celebration. In these right-size gatherings in parks, on blocks, at town greens and city squares, we can gain so much more than kitschy displays and logo T-shirts — loneliness dispelled, neighborhoods sustained and a torn national fabric slowly darned from the inside out. For the sake of our history and maybe our country, we should let a thousand Juneteenths bloom.