Poems, Reflective Prose at Juneteenth Observance

June 19, 2025
• Needham residents recognized the day of hope and freedom at an intimate ceremony on the Town Common Thursday morning.

One-hundred-sixty years ago, more than 250,000 enslaved people living in Galveston, TX finally learned they were free. June 19, 1865 continues to mark a painful past and revelatory moment in the country’s history.

Juneteenth, or Emancipation Day, “is a celebration of freedom, and it’s an opportunity to reflect on the struggles of equality,” Select Board member Josh Levy said during Thursday’s observance. Juneteenth became a federal holiday in 2021.

Though slavery would not be formally outlawed until December 1865, “many consider Juneteenth to be our country’s second Independence Day,” state Sen. Becca Rausch said. The holiday laid a foundation on which to advance civil rights and justice, she said.

“Celebrations of the end of slavery often have three goals: to celebrate, to educate and to agitate,” Rausch said. “So, let us celebrate. Imagine the joy and jubilation of newly freed Black Americans. Let us open our hearts and minds to learning more about ongoing struggles for justice and freedom, for equity and acceptance… And let us agitate for the rights that comprise the bedrock of this country.”

What followed the end of slavery were “more insidious issues of inequality,” including segregation, systemic racism and lynchings, state Rep. Josh Tarsky said. More work needs to be done, he said, and Juneteenth allows the country to both celebrate its progress and look toward the future.

“Juneteenth serves as a reminder of who and where we’ve been, providing a helpful marker, a beacon that helps us look around and ask, what now?” Tarsky said. “What next step do we take as a society to live up to our country’s ideals and potential?”

Rising Needham High School senior Talia Dwyer read President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, made effective Jan. 1, 1863, that freed enslaved people in all Confederate states. Needham Poet Laureate Anne Nydam introduced two readers who shared poems penned by Black poets.

Abolitionist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s “Songs for the People” invoked hopefulness and peace for Carmen Fields, who recited the 1895 poem at the ceremony. Fields, a journalist and Needham resident, said the poem’s message resonated because of its positivity.

Our world, so worn and weary,
Needs music, pure and strong,
To hush the jangle and discords
Of sorrow, pain, and wrong.

Fields grew up in Oklahoma and recalled a complicated relationship with June 19 — it was the only day in the year that African Americans, at the time, could visit a local amusement park. Her mother disapproved, meaning Fields didn’t attend.

“So, it’s a bittersweet kind of commemoration,” she said, “bitter in the sense that that was an experience for me, but sweet in that we moved much farther than that in terms of access and public accommodations.”

This Juneteenth, rising NHS sophomore Michael Williams thought back on his family’s extensive involvement in civil rights. Williams’ cousin Ernest Green was part of the Little Rock Nine, the group of Black teenagers who integrated into a white Arkansas high school in the 1950s, and became the first of the nine to graduate.

That personal history, as well as his parents’ work in African American studies and DEI, motivates Williams to stay involved, even amidst what he considers a hostile political climate.

“I thought it was important for me to keep fighting for what my parents really believe in and what’s important,” he said, “because African American history is very much important and [engrained] in the history of this country.”

Williams read “& So,” a poem by former National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman that reads, in part:

Despite being drenched with dread,
This dark girl still dreams.
We smile like a sun that is never shunted.

“Even when the news is full of darkness and chaos, we must continue to have hope,” Rausch said. “That is what Juneteenth reminds us all to do — never give up hope and to never stop trying to do what is good and right, what is respectful and welcoming, what we will be proud to pass on to the generations that come after us.”

Fields said she’s holding onto her hope.

“I remain hopeful and think that my forebears went through much worse times than we’re experiencing now, and that they were hopeful and made a way for us, so I hope to make a way for the future generations,” Fields said. “And as John Lewis used to say, find some ‘good trouble’ to get into.”