Celebrating Juneteenth in the Modern Era of Preemption

What does a multi-racial democracy actually look like? What does it look like for Black people in the South, the descendants of enslaved people, to exercise self-determination on the same land of their enslavement? And in this moment, what does it mean to celebrate Juneteenth as state legislatures across many Southern states work to revive the Confederacy by suffocating local democracy and targeting municipalities governed by Black people?

Juneteenth celebrates not simply the idea of Emancipation. It stands for the lived experience of freedom. The Emancipation Proclamation only freed those enslaved people within the Confederacy who could escape to the Union Army lines, and the Thirteenth Amendment’s reach only extended as far as the army’s power.

It was only on June 19, 1865 – when the last enslaved people in Texas were finally freed – that emancipation was fully realized across the nation.

After Juneteenth and during the Reconstruction Era, newly liberated Black communities built local democracies, public schools, and civic infrastructure. We know what Black self-determination in the South looks like. It looks like Freedom Hill, now known as Princeville, established in 1865 by newly emancipated people in Edgecombe County, NC. They worked together to construct housing, schools, churches and businesses – forming a self-governing community that exercised itself both politically and economically.

We also know what multi-racial democracies in the South look like. It looks like South Carolina’s 1868 state legislature – the only majority Black legislature in American history. They passed a new state constitution that allowed men to vote regardless of race, wealth or education; required a system of public education accessible to children of all races; and abolished debtor’s prisons.

Many of these courageous experiments in democracy were not allowed to grow and thrive for long. Jim Crow ushered in a renewed age of racial terror and political subjugation. Through the force of law and state-sanctioned violence, many Southern Black communities were again denied access to political and economic power. They were increasingly lynched, their schools were burned, and their ability to vote, along with their political representation, was decimated.

Over the past 60 years, we have fought for, won and lost various aspects of racial, social, and economic justice – only to have our collective will preempted by conservative state legislatures who draw their political power and tactics directly from the Jim Crow Era.

Southern legislatures, emboldened by the federal government, are increasingly using this moment to preempt local decision making, especially when those local decisions are made by and for the benefit of Black and other people of color.

The Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act has unleashed an explosion of gerrymandering and discriminatory redistricting across Southern states, explicitly designed to dilute or eliminate Black political power at the ballot box.

At the same time, abusive state preemption has operated as a second and coordinated prong of attack — stripping localities, particularly those with large Black populations, of the authority to expand voting access and civic participation, with the goal of making it harder and harder for Black people and communities of color to exercise their vote or secure policies they need, deserve, and demand.

The scale and ambition of today’s abusive preemption is staggering: in 2025 alone, the Local Solutions Support Center tracked over 800 preemption bills introduced in state legislatures across the country.

In Tennessee, state lawmakers responded to the Memphis City Council’s unanimous passage of the “Tyre Nichols Driving Equality Act” — a local measure addressing the kind of pretextual traffic stop that cost Mr. Nichols his life — by not only overriding it, but passing sweeping legislation forbidding any municipality from limiting law enforcement’s ability to take what the state deems “all necessary steps” in responding to crime.

And in Texas — the birthplace of Juneteenth — the governor has threatened to withhold hundreds of millions of dollars in state funding from cities that maintain sanctuary policies protecting immigrant residents from federal enforcement, a direct echo of the fiscal coercion and intimidation states have long deployed against localities trying to fulfill the promise of democracy and equal protection for all of their residents.

Now, 161 years after Juneteenth, we are still fighting for self-determination. We are challenging attempts to preempt local democracy in courtrooms and city councils, while organizing to build power locally in people’s assemblies. We are onboarding, coalition building, canvassing, protesting – not simply to resist, but to collectively build something new. Again.

What followed Juneteenth 1865 was an era of Black self-determination and political power that allowed multi-racial democracies to seed and grow.

As we celebrate Juneteenth, we should honor the resilience and accomplishments of our ancestors. Tell their stories of collectivity and creativity as we write our own. Let us tap into their wisdom and resolve as we fight for the freedom to govern ourselves.