Join us for our signature musical Shabbat in honor of Juneteenth, featuring guest speaker Billie Davis Gaines.

Dr. Gaines will share with the congregation reflections on the second national commemoration of the Juneteenth holiday, signed into law by President Biden on June 17, 2021. The holiday, whose name is a combination of June and 19, is the day in 1865 when all Black Americans, whether in Confederate or Union states, learned that they were free. The celebration started with the freed enslaved people of Galveston, Texas. Although the Emancipation Proclamation freed enslaved people in the South in 1863, it could not be enforced in many places until after the end of the Civil War in 1865. Union Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger and his troops arrived at Galveston on June 19, 1865, with news that the war had ended and that the enslaved were now free.

The Black Americans who celebrated the first Juneteenth anniversary in 1866 established the tradition of gathering in religious services to recount the struggles and victories of their elders and to prayerfully dedicate themselves to move the next generations forward. Dr. Gaines will honor this tradition by recalling the lives of her two grandfathers, born into newly freed Alabama plantation families in the late 1800s, who championed intellectual, economic and social elevation through education, enterprise, and service to family and community.