To commemorate Juneteenth, Foley welcomed Ted Johnson, a retired U.S. Navy Commander and contributing columnist at the Washington Post, for a program titled “Pride & Reckoning” about the proud history of Black Americans and what we need to do to address and reckon with America’s complicated past.
Our Chairman and CEO Daljit Doogal welcomed attendees to the firmwide virtual program and introduced Johnson, whose background includes serving as a White House Fellow and speechwriter to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, publishing a book titled When the Stars Begin to Fall: Overcoming Racism and Renewing the Promise of America, and earning a doctorate of law and policy from Northeastern University.
Johnson began the program by showing a picture of his great-grandfather taken at a county fair in southwest Georgia at the height of the Jim Crow era. “That picture captures a man who can hold pride and reckoning at the same time,” he said. He is in a place that would not allow him to vote or take part in civic activities, yet he is standing there not in fear or defiance but in his best sharecropping attire with a background featuring the American flag.
“That’s what Juneteenth is really about – pride in the progress we have made and reckoning with the fact that we have not yet lived up to our ideal of a more perfect union.”
The discussion that followed featured a brief history of Juneteenth and an examination of the opportunity we now have to make it something of meaning for the country.
Johnson explained the progression of Juneteenth from a local holiday in Galveston, Texas, where word of emancipation finally reached the last enslaved Black Americans in 1865, to a federal holiday in 2021. “The traditions that folks in Texas established did not necessarily travel with the news of Juneteenth,” said Johnson, and “there are lots of people with this new holiday that do not know what to do with it.”
Johnson currently serves as senior advisor for New America’s flagship US@250 initiative, which centers on the 250th anniversary of the nation’s independence in 2026 and the narratives that accompany it. He told attendees that to him, Juneteenth and the end of slavery represents a second birth of this country because it got us closer to our ideals. “Juneteenth is the 2.0 version of Independence Day,” he said. It completes the work unfinished in part 1 and doesn’t preclude a part 3.”
Declaring Juneteenth as a federal holiday was not politically divisive and it did not arrive with set of civic rituals, Johnson explained. We now have the opportunity to protect Juneteenth from polarization and commercialization, claim it as a holiday for all of us, and fill it with rituals that remind us that those who have been excluded in this country have insisted that we make it better.
“The future demands that we all express pride in progress, reckon with the history of slavery, and have a shared vision going forward. Juneteenth is an empty vessel waiting for us to make it something of meaning for the country.”
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Author(s)

Alexis P. Robertson
Director of Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
[email protected]