In celebration of Juneteenth, we asked inspiring creators—poets, playwrights, novelists, and cultural icons—what they would want to say to the ancestors, about their lives, their ambitions, and what life is like today.
June 19, 1865, was going to be like none other for the enslaved in Galveston, Texas. They would learn, more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation, that slavery had ended and so had the Civil War.
A celebration was in order, and it would be called Juneteenth, a joyous occasion with music, dance, and food. They showed up in their Sunday best white clothes, proud and elated to be free. Unfortunately, there would be struggles ahead that would continue for many years to come. To this day, the fight for justice and equality continues. But there has also been much progress and success. These participating creators continue to pay homage to the ancestors through their power of storytelling. You can read it and feel it in their notes. They are heartfelt and rich in gratitude for the tools those before them left behind so that they can go forward with confidence, pride, and determination.
Happy Juneteenth, and here's to the ancestors, never to be forgotten.
S. A. Cosby
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My great-great-grandfather founded the church my parents were married in, with seven other Black men two years after the end of the Civil War. There were times I've imagined their greatest dream was for me to be able to speak as a human being without fearing I'd end the day swinging from a tree. I imagine their dreams were filled with peace where love abides and a bit of that Southern hospitality they may have heard so much about but never experienced. I want them to know, on this Juneteenth, we came for everything they said we couldn't have.
If trauma poisons the blood, so too must hope ignite it. Like a flame, Hope and dreams burnt through you. Desire and joy kept quiet, laid dormant in your cells—bled through and birthed its way to me. So unrelenting was it that it heals me to this day, inspiring every cell to breathe stories to life, that speak to our magic. May your fire continue to spread and engulf us all.
My mother’s grandmother, the matriarch of our sprawling Southern family, was the daughter of slaves. So, in Liberty County, Texas—where my sister and I lived as children—we have long celebrated the anniversary of the day that Union General Gordon Granger brought liberty, and word of emancipation, to our state. This Juneteenth, I am thinking of all the ancestors and elders who struggled and sacrificed to make real the promise of emancipation—and the promise of America—for they earned their place among our proudest patriots. If we could speak with them across the ages, I would thank them not merely for their resilience, but also for their deep, abiding faith in the idea of America: That all are created equal with equal rights—and that all deserve equal dignity, equal opportunity, equal justice. No community understands the American project quite like ours. No community has given more to realize the democratic values we all still share, across our myriad differences. No community can stake greater claim to the greatness of our nation.
I would like my ancestors to know that I do my best to see and honor all of their fullness and complexity. When we examine the history of slavery in particular, it can be tempting to focus singularly on narratives of triumph—stories of those who overcame or escaped the violent, barbaric system. I understand the impulse, and I often share it. It is deeply important to have stories of those who resisted the institution in that way. But I also think it’s important to tell the stories that exist beyond Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass. The stories that are more complex and reveal how living in slavery meant living with a series of impossible choices. Those more complicated stories also deserve to be told.
A fact of my life is that I’m from Oklahoma because of the Trail of Tears. My ancestors were forced from our original homelands in Tennessee to the northeastern corner of the state, bringing a fire from the stolen home to the new one. For Indigenous folks—or any group that’s had to fight to exist—we struggle to be seen. Battling erasure is a legacy from our ancestors, passed down like brown eyes, our very existence. I relish bringing Indigenous stories to print. To use my Cherokee family’s name in the pages of a book, to tell stories of life in my Oklahoma community, and to honor the tribes of the lands I live on now in Rhode Island. This is how I honor my ancestors. To write a story is to build our ancestral fire and draw as many people as we can to see us. We are still here.
In an ironic twist, they don’t want us here now. In fact, they’re pretending they never dragged us over here in the first place, telling their kids we straight migrated here for work and what not—lol! Anyway, yeah—they’re trying every which way they know how to get rid of us, so I just want to say thanks for the survival skills. They’re coming in awful handy.
We're still here. America didn't win. It's still trying to, but we aren't going away. There's even more of us now. And we remember you, and honor you, but we look ahead, too, and plan on being here after America's gone.
I wouldn't be an actor without having seen Madge Sinclair on TV in the '70s or Rosalind Cash performing Shakespeare. I wouldn't be a Tony-nominated writer without Alice Childress and Adrienne Kennedy. I am standing on their shoulders as I continue to tell our stories to wider audiences, so people listening and watching can see themselves and be inspired to tell their stories. I don't just hold my ancestors' stories—I carry them forward.
The first time I heard the name Kofi was in college, when my boyfriend at the time, Michael, would occasionally bring up a friend of his named Kofi. I think partly because I was so smitten with the sound of Michael’s voice (he went on to become an internationally acclaimed rap artist), and partly because I was drawn to the cadence of the word, I fell in love with the name Kofi. It wasn’t until my husband, Chris, and I were thinking of boy names when I was pregnant that I remembered the name Kofi, and discovered it meant "born on a Friday" in Ghanaian, which made me love it even more. The ancestors have showed up many times throughout my life, but when our son was born in the wee hours of a Friday morning in July 2005, 11 days passed my due date, I knew that was them, saying, "What we’re not gonna do is let this boy miss his mark of African descent, and his mother’s love."
What I would say to my ancestors is simply this. You remained unbowed and unbroken. The stripes on your back did not hold you back, did not extinguish your promise. You emerged triumphant. I know that I stand on the shoulders of giants.
My uncle Raymond was a proper son of New Orleans, a place he couldn’t help but boast about when my mom and I would visit each summer. He’d work a full day, then spend his evenings driving us around the city offering personalized tours, stories attached to anything he pointed out. The times spent there resulted in some of my fondest memories—licking snowballs on hot days, walking through Armstrong Park, daring my uncle to drive us across Lake Pontchartrain. It’s not the jazzy, mystical New Orleans that I came to adore but instead the site of these incredible moments of my youth, which has inspired my writing. I’m so grateful to my uncle for sharing his New Orleans with me.
