As we celebrate Juneteenth, it’s important that we not view it as just another holiday. We must not only remember its history, but also educate our children and countless others who know not its true meaning.

Its history is that of oppression, of dreams deferred at the hands of enslavers who fought not only to keep Black people in bondage, but who, even after losing the Civil War, fought just as hard to keep hundreds of thousands in the dark that they had been freed.

Juneteenth has only been a federal holiday since 2021, more than 150 years since President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation freeing slaves. On June 19, 1865, more than two years later, Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas, to make it known that the 250,000 people still illegally enslaved were no more.

Oppressors have been trying to keep truths from us for years, just as they’re fighting now to keep the truth about slavery from being taught in our schools. Pretending our history doesn’t exist is not freedom. Of course, none of us are truly free until we are all free, and Juneteenth signifies that truth more than any other day of the year.

The reality, though, is that Juneteenth was just the beginning of a long battle we are still fighting – blood, sweat and tears – to attain complete freedom.

After the Civil War, Blacks worked tirelessly, many in vain, to reunite with family members whom they’d been separated from during slavery. And to make a better life for themselves and their children, between 1861 and 1900, they founded more than 90 institutions of higher education, according to the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

And we cannot stop. Now, more than ever, with so much at stake, we need all hands on deck to continue the fight that many of our ancestors died to attain, praying their children’s children would one day know the taste of true freedom. We still have a ways to go, but working together, we will get there – one day, one vote, one election, one battle at a time.