Buffalo Common Council member Zeneta Everhart joins In Focus this week to chat about the importance of the Juneteenth holiday and the need for further education surrounding it.
“Juneteenth is an important holiday for celebration and for education and we need to bring it to light for the larger world,” she said. “July Fourth is the holiday that we associate with freedom in this country. But unfortunately, my ancestors were enslaved. They weren’t free. And so we have to celebrate the diversity of this country. Black people built this country on their backs. Their blood is embedded in the soil of his country. We have to talk about Galveston, Texas, you have to talk about why there was a civil war in the first place. Right? Are we teaching that in our schools into our children, and we shouldn’t be teaching that to them. And so, you know, it’s 2021. I was absolutely elated when President Biden made this a federal holiday because now we have to teach it right we don’t get to skirt it right before it was, like, we can teach about Juneteenth, but we can kind of throw it in there a little bit, right? But now it’s a federal holiday and we have to talk about it.”
“As education chair for the City of Buffalo Common Council, that makes me very happy because education is important. That is one of the things that I talked about after 5/14 and when I went and testified before Congress about the need to educate our country. Because [those] who carried out that terrible, terrible day in the city of Buffalo, he was uninformed. He was miseducated, and that’s at the hands of this country.”
You can hear the full conversation between Zeneta Everhart and JoDee Kenney via the video player above. And be sure to tune in for a look inside the biggest issues impacting Upstate New York, on In Focus with JoDee Kenney — every Sunday on Spectrum News 1.
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