Professor Lasana Kazembe shares the importance of telling the full story of Juneteenth

Lasana Kazembe is a professor of education in Africana studies at IUPUI. He shared that we have an obligation to remember and honor Juneteenth.

Juneteenth commemorates the emancipation of enslaved African Americans in the United States. On June 19, 1865, Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas, and delivered the news of the Emancipation Proclamation and effectively ending slavery in the last Confederate state.

“Our obligation to tell that story is an obligation to tell it in its fullest,” he said. “So we tell the awful parts, the troubling parts, the painful parts, but we don’t stay limited in an endless analysis of domination. We also tell the parts about the critical hope, transcendence, and the overcoming.”