Black Freedom - by Blair LM Kelley (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

The first fully illustrated history of Juneteenth and other Emancipation Day celebrations, told through photographs, art, and an engrossing narrative from an award-winning historian. 

For more than 150 years, Black communities have gathered to honor freedom, resilience, and the ongoing struggle for true liberation. While Juneteenth has recently gained wider recognition, it was one of many Emancipation Day traditions celebrated across the United States. These observances were spaces of joy, remembrance, and resistance--even as the fight for full freedom was unfinished. This volume brings together stirring essays and striking images from Juneteenth and beyond, offering a sweeping portrait of how Black people have created and sustained rituals of remembrance, a testament to the generations who, through celebration and storytelling, demanded that their contributions to the making of America be fully recognized.

Review Quotes

"Black Freedom documents the perseverance, resistance, and, more importantly, the unquenchable joy that is an indelible part of the Black American backstory. Kelley doesn't give us an account; she gives us our account. This is history as it should be told."

--Michael Harriot, New York Times bestselling author of Black AF History

"Blair Kelley's language sings--each sentence shaped with a poet's care, each page alive with the unshakable resolve of Black people. Black Freedom is more than a book; it is a chorus of memory and hope."

--Bettina Love, New York Times bestselling author of Punished for Dreaming

"This is a portal. This is time travel facilitated by one of the great historians of our time. Thanks to Blair Kelley, we can go to an important fissure in the story of domination. We can wonder new wonderings and ask new questions about freedom. We can look love in the face and see what it is asking of us now."--Alexis Pauline Gumbs, award-winning author of Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde

About the Author

Blair LM Kelley is an award-winning author, historian, and scholar of the African American experience. She is also the president and director of the National Humanities Center, the only independent center for advanced study in the world dedicated exclusively to the humanities. Kelley is the author of Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship (2010) which was awarded the Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Prize and Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class (2023), which received the 2024 Brooklyn Library Book Award, the 2024 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Book Award, the 2024 Philip Taft Labor History Prize, and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award in History.