Community Stories

Tell the story only you can tell.

If you are African American, Black, Native, or any person of color who has lived through what Juneteenth people lived through — racial profiling, wrongful arrest, harassment, eviction, a name dragged through the dirt, a family member taken too soon — this page is for you. Tell us where you're from. Tell us what happened. Bring pictures if you have them.

We built this country alongside everyone else, but we were the ones slaving to build it. A lot of us are getting older and we are tired of being treated like trash. The way we find peace is by getting it out. Your words become part of this archive.

Before the community stories

What Black people have already lived through.

History is not background. It is the floor we stand on when we write what is happening to us right now.

1865·Historical record · General Order No. 3

Galveston, Texas — June 19, 1865

Two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation, Union Major General Gordon Granger rode into Galveston, Texas, and read General Order No. 3 aloud: 'The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.' For a quarter of a million Black people in Texas, freedom had been delayed by years — not by misunderstanding, but by the refusal of slaveholders to give it up. Juneteenth honors that delayed dawn, and the truth that freedom delayed is freedom denied.

1921·Historical record · 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre

Tulsa, Oklahoma — Greenwood was burning

Greenwood was called Black Wall Street — a thriving district of Black-owned banks, hotels, theaters, doctors, lawyers, grocers, and homes. On May 31 and June 1, 1921, a white mob, deputized by city officials and joined by the National Guard, burned 35 city blocks to the ground. As many as 300 Black residents were killed. Ten thousand were left homeless. No insurance was paid. No one was prosecuted. The story was buried for decades — left out of school books, left out of newspapers — until survivors and their descendants forced it back into the light.

1955·Historical record · 1955

Money, Mississippi — Emmett Till was 14

Emmett Till was 14 years old, visiting family from Chicago, when he was accused of whistling at a white woman in a grocery store. Days later he was kidnapped, tortured, shot, and thrown into the Tallahatchie River with a cotton-gin fan tied to his neck with barbed wire. His mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, insisted on an open casket so the world could see what was done to her son. Her courage helped ignite the civil rights movement. Decades later, the woman who accused him admitted, in part, that she had lied.

1965·Historical record · March 7, 1965

Selma, Alabama — Bloody Sunday on the Edmund Pettus Bridge

Six hundred peaceful marchers, led by John Lewis and Hosea Williams, walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge demanding the right to vote. State troopers met them with billy clubs and tear gas. John Lewis's skull was fractured. The footage went out across television sets in living rooms nationwide, and a country that had looked away could not look away anymore. Five months later, the Voting Rights Act became law. The bridge — still named for a Confederate general and Klansman — still stands.

today·Lived experience · ongoing

Every Black driver knows this feeling

It is the headlights behind you that don't pass. It is the hands at ten and two. It is the wallet placed on the dashboard before the officer reaches the window. It is calling your mother from the side of the road afterward, voice steady, because if you let yourself feel it now you will not be able to drive home. From Long Beach to Mobile to anywhere in between — the script does not change. We are tired. We came here for peace. We came here so that one day a Black driver can simply be a driver.

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