Juneteenth and Our Stolen Summer
Thoughts on an unlikely season.
I’m a seasonal person, through and through. The seasons have a real effect on me. While others wait for autumn’s crisp embrace or winter’s sultry solitude, I live for these long LA summer days. I wait for the jacarandas all year, their purple petals carpeting my city’s sidewalks like confetti. It’s been called “the purple party” and “a violet utopia,” the result of one of our most cherished trees blooming in all its glory. Those blossoms coincide with sunlight in the sky that stretches into the night and feels so, so sweet to me. Sometimes, the salt air from the Pacific can even be felt far inland, on the skin or the tongue. The way the city opens up in summer, calls me outside to come sit a while, come walk, come laugh, come just be. I love it so much.
My people chose this light. My great grandmother Annie R. Fisher of Texas chose sun and motion and to keep going west until the ocean said “Okay, this is home, Lovely Annie. Stay here.” She chose California because this place felt like possibility… with space to breathe… and be.
But this summer feels different. This summer, I watch people calculate routes to avoid certain neighborhoods. I heard the worry in a friend’s voice yesterday - I’ll call her Ms. Perez for the purposes of this writing - when she asked me, “How long do you think this will last? The whole four years?” I tried to sooth her with talk of mid-terms and ICE running out of money and anything I could to convey hope I didn’t feel in that moment. I tried. Because seeing whole families choosing between work and safety, between grocery runs and arrest is a wild thing to witness. It’s an even wilder thing to try to ignore… as so many are.
While beauty remains in LA this summer and bougainvillea still climb so many fences as you drive along in the hazy sunshine, there’s a shadow that’s turned our breezy summer afternoons into hunting season.
Today is Juneteenth, the day we commemorate news of emancipation finally reaching Texas in 1865, two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation. That fact still pisses me off. Two and a half years more to wait for something that had already been declared. After 246 years of enslavement, kidnapping, rape, torture, death for human beings seen as less than animals. Years when slavecatchers roamed the land, hunting Black people to put them back in bondage. It didn’t matter if you were legally free or had escaped the terror, you could be taken. And that was that.
Dr. Stacey Patton wrote powerfully on Substack recently, about the deflections we hear when other communities are under attack. How easy it becomes to say let them handle it, this is their fight. But history reminds us that the success of every freedom movement has been championed by those who understood that liberation is never singular, never just about one group’s survival.
The group in question these days is a group that some perceive as having betrayed fundamental principles of human dignity with their recent vote for Trump. In my opinion, this is a horribly short-sighted, ahistorical response that doesn’t take into account 1) the mighty history of Black and Brown solidarity in Los Angeles, or 2) the fact that those being targeted now didn’t vote at all because they couldn’t, or 3) the fact that the majority of Latinos in this country voted against Trump, or 4) the fact that the myth of white supremacy and its terrorism is the villain here… not a woman getting her child snatched out of her arms or the men at Home Depot looking for work.
If none of that matters to you, Dr. Patton reminds us that this trauma we are watching isn’t really about who likes or votes with us, anyway. It’s about who’s next. Attacking and abducting the undocumented is an attack and abduction of all of our freedoms. Criminalizing anyone that even LOOKS like they may be undocumented in LA without legal grounds or due process sets the stage for arresting anybody deemed "criminal" for all sorts of reasons. Black folks know this to be true as it’s been our reality since we were brought here against our will and forced to call this country home despite its murderous foundation.
That criminalization now extends to elected officials across the aisle, judges, teachers, anyone speaking against the current regime by way of protests… or soon in private. Isn’t that a reason to look up and pay attention? To fight?
They hunt in our neighborhoods. They erase our histories from textbooks and museums. They turn this summer into a season of hiding. Amidst all of this, choosing to protect each other becomes an act of defiance. Liberation isn’t just about ending oppression, it’s about claiming life! Juneteenth isn’t only about General Granger and those valiant Black troops delivering the news of freedom in Galveston and the fight to survive. It’s about how our ancestors fought to live. To taste the jasmine in the air on warm summer nights, to dance at festivals, to teach our children the full truth of their inheritance. To live! How can we not want that for others?
When ICE vans replace ice cream trucks in my city, and families can’t drive to the park or walk to the damn corner store, and the city’s invitation to come outside becomes a threat, the simple act of existing in public space without fear becomes radical. This can’t be ignored. This can’t be explained away as “not my fight.” That can’t be the response from freedom loving people. From anyone who believes in justice and dignity for all. The seasons of joy stolen from people who chose this city just like my Big Grandma Annie did, shouldn’t be forgotten or dismissed or ignored. Especially today.
On this Juneteenth, I’m reminded that the journey toward freedom never ends… it just changes routes. The slavecatchers wear different uniforms now and, for the moment, they hunt people who don’t look like me. I invite us to think about how freedom has always been conditional, how liberation has always been a season that some are allowed to enjoy while others wait in the shadows.
Everything is connected: ICE abductions on the streets of Los Angeles, Jim Crow lynch mobs and modern day police terrorizing Black human beings, Palestinian families ripped from their homes and slaughtered as they line up for food. Let us draw the parallels and link arms.
Today, maybe we don’t just remember Juneteenth, but refuse to let history repeat. Refuse freedom delayed. We can be documenting everything, donating to defense and meal funds, attending or hosting rights trainings, interrupting ICE encounters, organizing our block or our building, talking about it, writing about it, creating about it, learning about it, teaching about it, showing up.
The call remains the same: to claim our right to simply be. And seasons remain the same: they always return. And the truth about freedom remains the same: it blossoms and flourishes when shared.
Wishing a brave and beautiful Juneteenth to us all.
Your passionate, powerful & uncompromising writing is the very definition of what 'showing up' looks like on this platform, and I personally know how authentically that manifests in your offline activism too. May Juneteenth continue to inspire all of us to show up where we can and whenever we can. The lessons of history have never been more relevant and the consequences of ignoring them never so stark.
Ms Ava...so poignantly spoken ..these truths that SHOULDbe self evident... that all are created equal..as a teenager Freedom Rider in the 1960s and as a lifelong SNCC member now an elder..my heart but not my spirit is broken..so your words of encouragement and grit and beauty to fight on..for the "we" of us must prevail...we cannot grow weary..come to far to turn back now. ASHAY!