06/19/2026
Today’s Juneteenth message is written by James A. Felton III, Fordham University’s Vice President for Equity and Inclusion:
Dear Fordham Community,
Last year, in this space, I wrote about Opal Lee, the "Grandmother of Juneteenth," and the spirit of Sankofa, the wisdom of reaching back to move forward. As I sit with this year's reflection, two words keep returning to me: hope and resilience.
Juneteenth marks June 19, 1865, the day enslaved people in Texas finally received word of their freedom, more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation had been signed. I first encountered this history nearly thirty years ago in John Hope Franklin's From Slavery to Freedom, where it was called Emancipation Day. What has always stayed with me is not just the delay, but what carried people through it. For two years, freedom was law but not yet life. And still, hope did not break. That is resilience: the refusal to let a slow dawn convince you the sun isn't coming.
Generations later, that same hope carried Ms. Lee, who turned a date marked by personal loss into a national day of healing. Her life reminds me that resilience is not simply enduring; it is holding onto hope long enough for it to become real for someone else.
This is the spirit I want to carry this Juneteenth. Hope that is not naive, but earned through generations of holding on. Resilience that is not just survival, but the quiet, daily choice to keep showing up, for our families, our communities, and ourselves. I find both in small acts: reaching out to relatives I have let too much time pass with, showing up for my community, and sitting in stillness with those who are no longer here, letting their hope and their strength settle into me like an inheritance.
I hope you might find these same threads this Juneteenth, wherever you look for them. In a phone call to someone you've missed. In a quiet moment of reflection. In the simple, defiant act of choosing hope when patience feels hard. These are not small things. They are how resilience moves through generations, and how hope becomes real.
Because that is what hope and resilience were always in service of: freedom. Not just the freedom declared on paper, but the freedom we build, day by day, in how we treat one another, in the communities we sustain, and in the futures we make possible for those who come after us.
This Juneteenth, may we hold fast to hope, draw strength from resilience, and walk a little further toward the freedom we are each called to help make real, recognizing in one another the common humanity at the heart of it all.
Yours in inclusion,
James A. Felton, III
Vice President for Equity and Inclusion
