Jala Tucker, 20, didn’t remember learning about Juneteenth in school.
Curious last week to see if her memory was correct, the Hampton University student reached out to her friends from the Baltimore high school she’d attended. No one remembered learning about the holiday, which commemorates the end of slavery in the United States.
“I was genuinely curious,” said Tucker, who is studying communications and leadership. “So I went to Twitter.”
Then Twitter blew up.
By Monday afternoon, Tucker’s June 19 message — “If you DID NOT learn about Juneteenth in school, RT this, I’m really trying to see something” — was retweeted more than 215,000 times.
“I had to mute the Twitter notifications, they were coming in so fast,” Tucker said.
She was shocked by the response and by how many people had not learned about Juneteenth in school. In more than 2,000 replies, many people said they’d learned of the holiday through social media or pop culture. A few mentioned that they’d received a formal history education, but still hadn’t heard of it. One woman said she’d learned of it through a Jeopardy question.
“I just finished taking (United States) history this year and have never heard this term until today,” one person said.
“I never knew it existed until it showed up in my iPhone calendar,” said another.
Tucker herself learned of the cultural holiday from her parents, who mention it every year on June 19.
“We’ll have deep conversations about our history, about how far we’ve come,” said Tucker.
Juneteenth commemorates June 19, 1865, the day Texan slaves finally learned of their freedom. They’d been legally free since the Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863 — more than two years earlier. Texas was the first state to recognize Juneteenth as a holiday in 1980. Today, 45 states and the District of Columbia recognize the holiday.
“Enslaved people in Texas were really not told of the end of the war and emancipation until significantly well after the surrender and the demise of slavery elsewhere throughout the South,” said Kevin Gaines, a professor at the University of Virginia.
Early in his career, Gaines helped rewrite the Advanced Placement United States History curriculum to be more inclusive. The high school curriculum is still lagging behind, he said, and Juneteenth is important as an opportunity for public education.
“African Americans have had to play an active role in fighting for their freedom,” Gaines said. “I think it has to do with a sense of promoting the idea that freedom for African Americans was and remains a constant struggle that requires vigilance… There’s an imperative not to forget the history of African American emancipation.”
The social studies curriculum from the Virginia Department of Education states that students will learn “the effects of war from the perspectives of Union and Confederate soldiers (including African American soldiers), women, and enslaved African Americans,” but it does not outright mandate learning about Juneteenth. A department spokesman was not immediately available for an interview.
“It makes sense for people to not know what it is,” said Tucker. “We tend to separate black history from American history. We see them as two different things, when they’re actually one.”
