Special Feature: Selected Poems for Reflections on Juneteenth

My Dear Friends:

Today marks the Juneteenth federal holiday in the United States that commemorates the day in 1865 when enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, learned of their freedom more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. "Despite Republican efforts to ban the teaching of accurate Black history in schools, Juneteenth became a federal holiday in 2022, signalling that Black history is American history. While this is not an official holiday in Canada, it is significant for thinking about the history of race, racial relations and education. Canada and the United States - once part of the British Empire - share a settler-colonial history. It is in this context that ideas about race were developed and circulated." (The Conversation, June 15: "Juneteenth matters for thinking about race relations in Canada and Canadian education")

Therefore, I would like to share with you a set of selected haiku and tanka for your reflections on the significance and impacts of Juneteenth.

Selected Haiku and Tanka:

slave cemetery

i scrape the moss to find

no name

William M. Ramsey

explaining Jim Crow

to my freshman students

the gulf

between cries

of cicadas

Laurence Stacey 

it’s hard

to prove racism --

something

dark and intangible

accumulating inside me 

Kozue Uzawa

passing the shadow

of the George Floyd mural wall

white cops on the beat

a Black man

cried, and cried out for his mother

then went quiet ...

years later my friend is stopped

and frisked on the same bloody spot

Chen-ou Liu

To conclude today's special feature post, I would like to share with you the follow remarks:

We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. 

-- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Civil Rights Activist and Minister

Hold those things that tell your history and protect them.

-- Maya Angelou, Memoirist, Poet, and Civil Rights Activist

FYI: Rabble, June 13: International body launches ‘special review’ of Canadian Human Rights Commission: 

The Canadian Human Rights Commission has faced years of accusations of bias and discrimination against its own Black employees.