Greetings, 19th friends!
We’re thrilled to welcome two new hires: Sereena Henderson, our new community manager, and Annelise McGough, our incoming newsletters editor. Sereena comes to us from Mississippi Today, where she managed the nonprofit newsroom’s social media, reported on Mississippi culture, curated the daily newsletter and pitched in on audience engagement projects. Sereena is a native of Mississippi and a graduate of the University of Mississippi. Her first day is Monday. Annelise comes to us from Grist, where she was the nonprofit newsroom’s growth and engagement editor. Annelise got her start in journalism at Fast Company after graduating from The New School. She joins our team June 29.
Follow Sereena and Annelise on Twitter, and welcome them to The 19th!
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Opal Lee at Fort Worth City Hall on June 19, 2015.
(Paul Moseley/Fort Worth Star-Telegram via AP)
OPAL'S WALK
Major companies are rushing to give employees the day off. Explainers are being written. Internet searches are surging. In 2020, as protests against police brutality against black people continue across the country, Juneteenth is finally being broadly celebrated. It’s the kind of widespread recognition that Opal Lee has been trying to secure for years.
- For four decades, Lee has been active in the push to have Juneteenth recognized as a national holiday, meeting with political leaders and spearheading organizing efforts.
- The 93-year-old went from throwing Juneteenth celebrations in her Fort Worth, Texas, community to organizing nationwide awareness campaigns.
Lee has visited more than a dozen cities to spread her message, and has urged presidential candidates and the Obama administration to officially designate Juneteenth as a national day of remembrance.
In 2016, she began visiting cities across the U.S. and walking 2.5 miles, a figure important to Juneteenth’s history. Last year’s walk held particular significance given its location: Galveston, Texas.
- On June 19, 1865, Union soldiers, led by Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger, arrived in the Texas port city, bringing news that the 250,000 enslaved black people in Texas were free — two and a half years after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.
- When Granger assumed command in Texas with over 2,000 Union soldiers, he read “General Order No. 3”: “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.”
Juneteenth celebrations in Fort Worth and elsewhere have been curtailed by COVID-19, but Lee is still actively promoting what she calls “her single greatest passion.”
- This year, Lee will strap on her tennis shoes and walk 2.5 miles in front of a caravan of cars in Fort Worth.
- Two weeks ago, Lee stood on the steps of a historic home in Fort Worth’s Terrell Heights neighborhood. It was there, she said, that in 1939, 500 white people forced her family out of the home they had just bought and set it on fire. The date was June 19, 1939.
- “The fact that it happened on the 19th day of June has spurred me to make people understand that Juneteenth is not just a festival,” she said. — Abby Johnston
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Kamala Harris wants America to turn protest into policy. Is she the one to make it happen?
By Errin Haines
As a child, Kamala Harris idolized Thurgood Marshall, Charles Hamilton Houston and Constance Baker Motley, the legal heroes who took the fight to dismantle racism to America’s halls of justice.
She was a pioneer, the first woman and African American to be elected California’s attorney general, and Harris says she became a prosecutor to change the system, as they had, not to join it.
“There was this tool that they had figured out was powerful, as powerful as anything, to achieve justice or get a step closer to that,” Harris said in an interview with the 19th.
The lone black woman in the Senate, Harris has joined protests in Washington, D.C., and is pushing for federal policing reforms — roles some see her as uniquely positioned to fill given her dual identities as a black woman and former prosecutor. But that same experience drew criticism during her presidential campaign last year — particularly among young black activists — when she was labeled “a cop” and her record cast as contributing to mass incarceration and the ills of law enforcement.
As the country reckons with the future of policing in black communities, in many ways, Harris’s career stands as a nexus: between cries to “defund the police” and calls to compromise and legislate; between pushes to redistribute resources to address the inequalities that can lead to deadly confrontations with officers and efforts to increase and improve training, accountability measures and bans on extreme uses of force such as chokeholds.
Harris sees the central question America is wrestling with as the central one of her life: Who will get equal justice under the law?
“I was born a black child in America, the child of parents who were marching and shouting, just like all the folks who have been marching and shouting in the streets these last days,” said Harris, the 55-year-old daughter of activists.
“From my childhood, I was there in a stroller in the streets, marching,” she said. “It’s just what I do. It’s what I believe in. I don’t know any other way.”
Harris brings her lived experience as a black woman and ex-prosecutor to this moment, said Tracie Keesee, a black woman who spent 25 years in the Denver Police Department and co-founded the Center for Policing Equity.
“There's an expectation from our community that we would try to do something from the inside, not knowing what the challenges are,” Keesee said.
“At some point in your career you realize you can only affect change so much because you do bump up against the system and you bump up against culture, and you’re only one person,” she said.
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CELEBRATION
Juneteenth is officially observed or commemorated in 47 states plus Washington, D.C.
Hawaii, North Dakota and South Dakota are the only holdouts. "I had no idea that [Juneteenth] was even a holiday. Never heard of it," said North Dakota’s Senate Majority Leader Rich Wardner. In Wardner’s state, the legislature would need to pass a bill in order for Juneteenth to be recognized.
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 What we’re reading
Curated by May Olvera
Jennifer McClellan could make history as Virginia’s first black female governor. Virginia state Sen. Jennifer McClellan announced her candidacy for governor on Thursday. She is the second Democrat to jump into the race, facing state Del. Jennifer Carroll Foy in the primaries. If either Foy or McClellan wins the gubernatorial race, they would become the country’s first black female governor. (Huffington Post, June 18)
Top State Department official resigns in protest of Trump's response to racial tensions in the country. Mary Elizabeth Taylor, one of the Trump administration's highest ranking black aides, resigned from her post on Thursday. "Moments of upheaval can change you, shift the trajectory of your life, and mold your character," she wrote in her resignation letter. "The President’s comments and actions surrounding racial injustice and Black Americans cut sharply against my core values and convictions." (Washington Post, June 18)
Study finds salary history bans boost pay for African Americans, women. Researchers at Boston University have found that barring employers from asking about an applicant’s pay history is beneficial to minorities, with African Americans and women seeing offers increase by 13 percent and 8 percent, respectively. They believe the bans could diminish wage gaps. (Wall Street Journal, June 18)
The rape kit’s secret history. Rape kits are one of the most powerful tools in cases involving sexual violence, yet hundreds of thousands go untested in crime labs across the country. Columnist Pagan Kennedy dove deep into the history of these too-often overlooked forensic exams — and the similarly forgotten woman who pioneered them. (New York Times, June 17)
Transgender elected officials from Andrea Jenkins to Gerri Cannon share their stories. Teen Vogue spoke to seven transgender elected officials from across the country about the hope and joy they have found as public servants, the obstacles they’ve faced along the way, and why they think more trans people should seek out leadership positions. (Teen Vogue, June 16)
The black female battalion that stood up to a white male army. A postal battalion of 855 African American women was sent to Birmingham, England, during World War II, which some members believed was a move to assure their failure. Determined to prevail despite their grueling workload, they quickly became the fastest and most reliable mail directory in Europe. (New York Times Magazine, June 17)
🎧 Listen: The lasting effects of having — or being denied — an abortion. Terry Gross interviews Diana Greene Foster, the principal investigator of a 10-year study comparing women who had abortions at the end of the legal deadline and those who just missed it and were turned away. They discuss why she conducted the study, what she found and the policy recommendations she makes based on her research. (Fresh Air, June 16)
📺 Watch: Susan La Flesche Picotte: The first American Indian doctor. In 1889, 24-year-old Susan La Flesche became the first Native American doctor, inheriting 1,244 patients overnight. On top of working up to 75 hours per week, she ran public health campaigns to educate her community and, in 1913, opened the first privately-funded hospital on any reservation. (PBS, June 17)
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