Juneteenth
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![My Ancestors Want Me to Make a Banana Pudding for Juneteenth [Updated]](https://www.theroot.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/f4p5m45bf1ylkn34sppp-300x169.jpg)
My Ancestors Want Me to Make a Banana Pudding for Juneteenth [Updated]
My mother hated to cook. She was a good cook when it came to things she liked—rice, chicken, all kinds of soul food and sweet desserts—and a bad cook for things she didn’t understand or eat. For years, I thought steak was supposed to be tough like shoe leather and chewier than gum. I thought…
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The Timeless Freedom of Miss Juneteenth
What does freedom look like? When you’re a black person in America living in a post-civil rights era world, currently suffocating from the smoke in a racist climate as the words “I Can’t Breathe” echo in the sky, the answer to that question is…complicated, to say the very least. June 19, 2020 marks 155 years…
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What Juneteenth and My Father Taught Me About 'Expectations'
I wouldn’t know Juneteenth without my father. He’s the Texan. He grew up celebrating the holiday that started on June 19, 1865, when slaves on Galveston Island, Texas, finally learned they’d been freed under the Emancipation Proclamation two years prior. Even though he now lived in St. Louis, he’d always make the same jokey reference…