“Juneteenth has never been a celebration of victory, or an acceptance of the way things are,” then-president Barack Obama said in his 2015 acknowledgment of the event. Since Obama issued those remarks, the celebration of Juneteenth has grown increasingly fraught, Jimmie Briggs observed for Vanity Fair in 2021, the same year Joe Biden signed the act that made the anniversary an official federal holiday. And today, many Americans still remain—as Briggs put it years ago—“incapable of facing the realities of our shared history.”
In today’s special newsletter, we seek to place those realities front and center. We have veteran correspondent Todd S. Purdum on the legislative battle to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act, while Taylor Branch offers a vivid portrait of that fight on the ground. Meanwhile, Shelia Weller separates fact from fiction in the 1955 homicide case that ignited the civil rights movement of the 1960s—a struggle that continues to this day. “For as long as people still hate each other for nothing more than the color of their skin…we cannot honestly say that our country is living up to its highest ideals,” Obama said over a decade ago. “Today is a day to find joy in the face of sorrow, to count our blessings and hold the ones we love a little closer. And tomorrow is a day to keep marching.”
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The holiday is becoming corporatized, but the attack on critical race theory shows why commemorating our history is more important than ever.
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The epochal story of the passage, against great odds, of one of the most important pieces of legislation in the nation’s history.
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In her 1956 autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues, Lady Day added to her triumphant yet tragic mythos, presenting a life filled with joy, despondency, and a surprising amount of hard-edged humor.
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In 2017, VF spoke to the author who tracked down the long-hidden woman at the center of the 1955 murder that catalyzed the 20th-century civil rights movement.
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In 1968 Palm Springs, as the author yearned for the would-be leading man of his Malcolm X screenplay, an era-defining act of violence fractured his world. Nicholas Boggs takes us inside Baldwin’s nearly fatal tangle with California.
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Following the Kennedy assassination, as Lyndon Johnson rallied his forces behind a historic civil rights bill, Martin Luther King Jr.’s battle for equality gathered strength across the South.
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