(Recorded at Carnegie Hall on June 19, 2019) Juneteenth marks the day in 1895 when slaves in Texas learned they were free. Abraham Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation two and a half years earlier, but many states ignored it, and it wasn’t until two months after the Civil War ended that Union troops arrived to enforce emancipation. The 19th of June became Juneteenth as every year growing numbers of African Americans recall with jubilation their ...

In 1852 Frederick Douglass was invited by the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society to give a speech commemorating the Fourth of July. On July 5, the crowds filling Corinthian Hall, Rochester, New York, did not get what they expected.