Smith: Juneteenth asks more of us than a ceremony

Three years ago, a band of activists publicly questioned why I, as the first Black person elected to office in Southlake, had not pushed the city to celebrate Juneteenth. Had they asked me directly, they would have learned that I was only marginally aware of the holiday and knew even less about its significance. 

That confession may sound strange coming from a Black man raised in Mississippi, and stranger still because my daughter had a small role in Miss Juneteenth, the Fort Worth-shot film released in 2020.

The case for recognition was stronger than I first allowed. For people whose history was kept off the official record on purpose, a proclamation makes them feel seen. Where the critics went wrong was treating the ceremony as the only acceptable proof of the slower work it stands for. I was being graded for virtue signalling, not service.

Local politics rewards this mistake all the time. By the time those residents were questioning my silence, I had spent years doing the quiet work — in schools, with families, in the places where better is actually built. None of it fit a Facebook complaint thread. Only a public proclamation would have counted.

But this isn’t simply about Juneteenth. Local communities get what they reward, and our leaders are the proof.

We complain about school boards that chase cultural fights, council members who confuse attention with leadership and officials who value social media followers more than results. Then we reward exactly that. Ceremony is easy to see; the slow work that changes how a place runs leaves nothing to point at. Even a holiday like Juneteenth gets reduced to the spectacle around it.

Growing up in Mississippi, I was never taught about Juneteenth, and none of the myriad books I read in college or years after mentioned it. The books in my parents’ home leaned toward my dad’s Chilton auto repair manuals, my brother’s physics and engineering textbooks and titles I ordered by mail from Louis L’Amour, Lewis Grizzard and Jerry Clower.

What my siblings and I did have were frequent conversations about prominent Black figures in history. My dad told us about inventors, scientists, entrepreneurs and civil rights leaders who shared our skin color. Those conversations stayed with me because my parents never spoke of race as either an impediment or a credential. It was part of who we were, but not the organizing fact of our lives.

One of the proudest moments I shared with my daughters was a civil rights trip from Texas to Mississippi and Alabama, where we stopped at the home where Medgar Evers was assassinated, crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, visited the parsonage where Martin Luther King, Jr. lived in Montgomery and toured the civil rights museum there.

It was important for my daughters to see that Black history is American history. Black Americans helped build this country, defend it, challenge it, improve it and force it closer to its own promises. Their contributions belong in the story of science and technology, politics and law, business and agriculture, government and war. Not as a special insert. As part of the main text.

That is how I now understand Juneteenth. Not as a test of who can perform reverence most visibly, but as a reminder of what memory should produce.

A ceremony is the easy part. The harder work is building better schools, safer neighborhoods, stronger families and more trustworthy local government.

That work rarely draws applause, but it matters more because it determines whether a community is actually honoring the people it claims to remember.

I now celebrate Juneteenth the same way my parents taught me to honor Martin Luther King Jr. Day: by teaching my children whose shoulders we stand on, serving my community and reminding others that we have more in common than we often admit.

Freedom delayed was still worth celebrating, but staged reverence does not build better communities.

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