Black Freedom : A Visual History of Juneteenth and Emancipation Days

I’m not sure whether it was intentional, but holding Black Freedom: A Visual History of Juneteenth and Emancipation Days in your hand feels a little like holding a devotional. Specifically the kind you’d find in the backs of church pews—embossed leather cover, slightly oversize but still compact enough to get an easy grip on, full of inspiration. Within it, author Blair LM Kelley has compiled an extensive archive of materials that celebrate Black freedom. It’s an unusually difficult task to undertake, Kelley writes, because “Early emancipation celebrations . . . predated modern journalistic photography.” By the time photography became more common, the historical records were often shaped by the biases of majority-white photojournalists. “The era of Jim Crow—the period when segregation laws were cemented, Black voting rights were stripped away, and racial violence was wielded to uphold white supremacy—gave rise to an archival silence.” That is why the images included in Black Freedom are so valuable, Kelley explains: “Their very existence is an act of defiance.”

The book is organized to give those images as much freedom as possible. Each section opens with an essay that provides context, followed by a sequence of images presented with minimal captions that supply only essential information. The effect encourages a quiet, attentive engagement with the material, which includes photographs, sketches, maps and a series of flyers advertising early Emancipation Day celebrations that are produced using the same woodblock printing technique that recurs throughout the book, including on its cover. There are several exceptional photographs here, but the book’s real strength is the quantity of images of Black families and celebrants throughout history. A photograph from the late 1880s shows a group of formally dressed people posing at a church picnic, and another shows Grand Marshal Moses Brantford Jr. in a top hat leading a procession down an Amherstburg, Ontario, street in 1894. Seen in a rare multitude, these historical figures function like an antidote to the images of Black suffering that seem to dominate the cultural imagination.

The book’s final chapter, “Juneteenth Today,” includes candid photographs from contemporary Juneteenth celebrations. A crew of dancers in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park wear matching T-shirts and step in unison; two sets of hands braid a young girl's hair in Los Angeles; smiling friends bump fists while astride horses in a Chicago parade. With its celebratory Pan-Africanist colors of red, green, black and gold recurring throughout, Black Freedom is an ode to joy, pride and resistance.