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Hi, my name is Sherrell Daley. I am interviewing... Kortnei Morris On the behalf of the Humanities Truck. Today is May 25, 2023. So how are you doing today? I'm doing well. A little cold, if I'm shivering, that's why, but doing well.

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I'm glad. So, what does Juneteenth mean to you? Wow, okay. Juneteenth for me is really important. We know of the Juneteenth that we're celebrating today, but honestly, this was one of the later kind of emancipatory holidays that African Americans celebrated. The first, I guess, large mass emancipatory movement for African Americans would actually be the American Revolution. And so we would have like emancipation holidays, not necessarily called a Juneteenth, but in New York and Illinois and all of that. So I came here, what Juneteenth means to me and all kinds of emancipatory holidays, is a way to learn history, re-imagine history, but the agency is back with black people. It's no longer things happening to black people, it's black people actually freeing themselves, like creating their own world. So, that is why I love Juneteenth. That's why I love emancipatory holidays. And I honestly didn't know about Shove Off day before I saw the flyer for this. So, yeah. So how did you first learn about Juneteenth? So I had always known about it because while my paternal grandmother is from Louisiana, East Louisiana, they had moved to west Texas, so Port Arthur. And so Juneteenth was a fairly big holiday in Texas. So I always knew, I had always known about Juneteenth for a while. It'd been like family lore, if that makes sense.

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OK, so how did you guys celebrate Juneteenth? So that's the thing. My grandparents were super big into black history, but we had never really celebrated it. So I guess formally I started celebrating it for myself last year. And so to celebrate, I actually went to visit a girlfriend in Chicago and then we went to tour black history sites in Chicago. And I'm continuing it this year. This year, I'll actually be going to Savannah, Georgia and checking out black history in Savannah, Georgia. So it now has, for me, become a day where I'm required to take off from whatever it is that I'm doing and immerse myself in my own history. So how do you feel about Juneteenth becoming a federal holiday, being more recognized? Um, I think it's wonderful primarily because Opal Lee is one of-grandmother of Juneteenth-kind of spearheaded that initiative. My only concern is I don't want it to become just a commercial holiday. I remember last year seeing weird plates and napkins, and I don't actually think that's true. To the Juneteenth, I don't think-like if you think about the really early Juneteenth celebrations in Texas, a lot of them often happened in parks and churches. It was a full day or a couple of days events. You spoke about civic participation. You spoke about education within the Black community. As it becomes a larger holiday and more people outwardly celebrate it, I hope it's less of a commercial endeavor and more of, I don't know, the events have to do with retelling the history and kind of like the important parts about like black history, the holiday, what have you.

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So thank you so much for your time. I hope you have a wonderful day. Thank you. Thank you.