Juneteenth: Celebrating Faith and Freedom

Rasool Berry grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. That city, known as the “cradle of liberty,” began phasing out slavery in 1780 but didn’t completely end it until 1847. Like many students, Berry learned in school that US slavery in Confederate states ended with Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. At university, Berry majored in Africana studies and sociology, so he knew about Juneteenth—the day the Union Army arrived in Galveston, Texas, to finally enforce freedom for enslaved people in Texas on June 19, 1965. Many of those Union troops were Black.

Years later, Berry learned how Juneteenth connects Christian faith and freedom. At the time, he was working with Cru (formerly Campus Crusade for Christ) and was the teaching pastor at Bridge Church NYC in Brooklyn, New York. Berry had heard Juneteenth referred to as Emancipation Day and Freedom Day. In 2016, he learned that Ms. Opal Lee, an 89-year-old retired teacher in Texas, was walking across the US to advocate for Juneteenth to become a national holiday.

“I discovered that those newly free people in Texas recognized Juneteenth as a Jubilee Day, like the Leviticus 25 ‘Sabbath of Sabbaths,’” Berry says. “Their first Juneteenth Jubilee event was to march from the Galveston courthouse to a church to sing, pray, and praise the Lord for deliverance. That fact got me into the project that resulted in the documentary Juneteenth: Faith and Freedom. Juneteenth’s message of faith can help us all weather the ebbs and flows of history. It can give us faith, hope, and strategies to move forward rather than give in to despair and discouragement.”

Faith in God and the full gospel helped enslaved people and their descendants endure, resist, and overcome a false gospel that justified their oppression. US Christians of all races can observe Juneteenth to bolster faith and meet despair with hope. Berry says you don’t have to be Black or attend a predominantly Black church to celebrate Juneteenth with respect.

“Their first Juneteenth Jubilee event was to march from the Galveston courthouse to a church to sing, pray, and praise the Lord for deliverance.”

Juneteenth Jubilee tradition

“The story of a God who created everyone in God’s own image undermines the narrative of American chattel slavery, which defined enslaved people as property,” Berry says. “The inspiration for recognizing all people as made in God’s image starts in the first book of the Bible. The second book, Exodus, is the story of God empathizing with the suffering of an enslaved people and supernaturally rescuing them. The prophets proclaimed freedom, and Jesus announced his ministry in Luke 4 by quoting Isaiah 61.

“The Jubilee found in Leviticus 25—a festival of freedom—further undergirded the spiritual yearning for freedom and the celebrations of Juneteenth as ‘Jubilee Day.’ The connections between Jubilee, Jesus, and Juneteenth are strong, because the notion of human dignity for the dispossessed and oppressed and liberation for all is a throughline throughout the biblical texts,” Berry says.

The vision for Juneteenth: Faith and Freedom started with Berry, but he needed a director to execute it. He turned to Ya’Ke Smith, an award-winning filmmaker and a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, to direct the film and bring it to life. In the documentary, Berry travels to Galveston to meet people such as retired educator Lawrence Thomas, who takes pride in the city his enslaved ancestors helped build. His great-grandfather, enslaved by Galveston’s founder, heard Gen. Gordon Granger announce to all Texans that all slaves were “thenceforward and forever free.” Rev. James B. Thomas, Lawrence’s father, founded the annual Juneteenth Pilgrimages in Galveston.

The documentary follows Berry as he learns more about the Christian faith of Juneteenth’s original observers. Juneteenth includes interviews with faith leaders who have preserved and expanded the celebration. Black Christian artists Sho Baraka, Marc Evan Diaz, Lecrae, Andrea Vocab Sanderson, and more appear on the soundtrack. The film is an Our Daily Bread Media production. In 2021, Rasool Berry joined Our Daily Bread Ministries as director, content developer, and partnership liaison.

Persistent faith

Throughout the film, Berry asks, “How could the church, which I believe to be a place of spiritual freedom, justify bondage?” At one point, Jude 3 Project founder Lisa Fields responds, “The first way to be OK with treating someone so badly is to dehumanize them. And then you won’t feel guilty about it. Anti-literacy laws were created to stop slaves from reading the Bible cover to cover. Enslavers didn’t want them to know that the Bible says we are all equal at the foot of the cross.”

Berry also visits a former sugarcane plantation southwest of Galveston with Samuel Collins III, an associate minister, financial consultant, and public historian. The plantation has preserved huge kettles outdoors to remind visitors of the dangers of working with boiling syrup. Standing outside ruins of slave cabins, Berry asks Collins, “How do you keep hope in the midst of studying such hard things?” 

“For me,” Collins replies, “this world is temporary, not eternal. Our ancestors stayed alive by hope to reach the next day. They knew that one day, they too, would transition to true freedom.” The faith that sustained Collins’s ancestors helped him persist in working with others to make Juneteenth a federal holiday and spearheading creation of the “Absolute Equality” mural in downtown Galveston.

As freed people from the Galveston area moved to other cities and states, they brought their Juneteenth traditions to new churches and communities. In the film, Berry talks with attorney Jacqueline Bostic-Elroy and her mother, Jacqueline Whiting Bostic, about the latter’s great-grandfather Rev. John Henry “Jack” Yates.

When Yates moved his family to Houston, there were no Black schools, so he started one. “Jack taught people to read, write, and start their own businesses,” Bostic-McElroy says. “Everything the Yates family was doing for somebody else, by the grace of God, they were doing for themselves. They made a way.”

As an influential figure in Houston’s Freedmen’s Town, Yates helped buy land to build Emancipation Park for Houston’s first Juneteenth celebrations. He was pastor of Antioch Missionary Baptist Church when its new building became Houston’s first brick structure to be both built and owned by African Americans. Rev. Lou McElroy, the current Antioch MBC pastor, is Bostic-McElroy’s husband. He says in the film, “Our congregation sits in the same pews built back then. Those early members used the same talents they used in building this country, now pouring into this church building, giving God the glory.”

Invitation to meet despair with hope

In Juneteenth, Lisa Fields cites Yates as an example of how “Black Christians preserved the truth of the gospel message . . . when white supremacists tried to distort it.” She explains that Jesus Christ came not only to save souls for eternity, but to bring “a holistic Christianity . . . that’s socially engaged, that empowers people economically and educationally. I think Rev. Yates had the foresight to see that the church needed to be leading on this issue.”

As in Houston, Black people built freedmen’s towns throughout the nation during the Reconstruction era after the Civil War. They took jobs in all sectors, including education, medicine, law, and politics. The Republican Party was founded by Black people and white allies working together.

But the backlash to Black achievement and interracial cooperation was swift and violent. In the film, Berry talks with Rev. Michael W. Waters, lead pastor of Abundant Life African Methodist Episcopal Church in Dallas, Texas. Waters notes, “There were eight hundred lynchings in Texas in the first year of freedom. It was a rage at society changing.” The result was the birth of the Ku Klux Klan in 1866 and the establishment of Jim Crow laws that limited Black people’s freedom to attend school, vote, own property, or choose where to live.

Waters shows Berry KKK memorabilia, such as a “hero cross” from the 1800s and a 1915 KKK hood and robe. Waters describes how the controversial 1915 silent film The Birth of a Nation inspired a former Methodist minister to revive the KKK and appoint himself imperial wizard: “In 1915, William Joseph Simmons took a group of men atop Stone Mountain in Georgia. They built an altar and put down an American flag, sword, and Bible. Simmons claimed he heard the angels of heaven rejoicing.”

“Righteous efforts to resist racism continue even today,” Berry says. “The journey from slavery to freedom has been long and arduous. Each generation has had to pick up from the last, passing on the legacy. And that’s why national recognition of Juneteenth means so much to our people and many others. It gives validation to their ancestors’ struggles and opportunities to celebrate the divine deliverance of body and soul. It’s a gift of hope to their children, grandchildren, and people like me.”

Waters explains what happens when people truly embrace God’s command to love one’s neighbor as oneself: “When you love your neighbor as yourself, it’s not just some [random] child being hurt—it’s my child. It’s not just some community over there being ostracized; that’s my community. To feel the pain through proximity, that’s our call. The light of Christ . . . opens our eyes so that we all see and bring equity to the world—and jubilee.”

Celebrating Juneteenth with respect

As decades passed, Black people celebrated Juneteenth with church-based community events, parades, barbecues, family reunions, concerts, historical pageants, and more. In 1879, Robert Evans, a Black legislator in the Texas House of Representatives, tried to make Juneteenth a Texas state holiday. Rev. James B. Thomas helped that finally happen in 1980, nearly a century later. Ronald Myers, a physician and Baptist minister in Mississippi, founded the National Juneteenth Observance Foundation. He worked with Samuel Collins III and Lawrence Thomas in Galveston, Opal Lee in Fort Worth, and others to make Juneteenth a federal holiday.

The last part of Juneteenth: Faith and Freedom highlights Opal Lee, who became the public face of the movement by doing a series of two-and-a-half-mile walks throughout the US to symbolize the two and a half years between the Emancipation Proclamation and Juneteenth.

In the film, she tells Berry about June 19, 1939, which did not feel like a celebration. “I was twelve years old. Five hundred white people gathered outside the house my parents had bought in Fort Worth. They didn’t want us in the neighborhood. Police said they couldn’t control the mob. Well, my parents sent us to friends several blocks away, and my parents left after dark. The mob broke into our house, burned the furniture, and threw out all our stuff. My parents worked and worked and worked and bought us another house,” says Lee, who got involved in community causes at age 76 after retiring from teaching.

The 2020 murder of George Floyd prompted a national movement that resulted in Juneteenth finally becoming a federal holiday in 2021. “Miss Opal” was eighty-nine then.

“People want to think about Juneteenth as a Black thing or a Texas thing, but it’s not,” she says. “It’s freedom for everybody. And I advocate celebrating freedom from the nineteenth of June to the Fourth of July.”

Berry agrees: “The story of Juneteenth is teaching that the end of slavery, no matter how incomplete, is worthy of celebration. It is an invitation to meet despair with hope, oppression with justice, and hate with love. And even when it [freedom] seems unattainable, my faith causes me to never stop fighting for freedom.”

He suggests that non-Black churches reach out to Black churches to explore opportunities to partner

together in celebrating Juneteenth. “If they’re not already doing something, perhaps you could cosponsor a Juneteenth: Faith and Freedom showing with a cross-cultural dialogue about current conditions,” Berry says. “Some churches have done a concert or worship service using songs from the soundtrack or otherwise related to Juneteenth.” His congregation started Pray March Act, a Christian civic discipleship coalition in New York City, as a “prayerful protest” on June 3, 2020, in response to the George Floyd murder. They later decided that PMA would highlight Juneteenth annually so justice conversations continue in New York City.

At the 2025 Calvin Symposium on Worship, Berry shared, with permission, a video of a white man’s reaction to a Juneteenth: Faith and Freedom showing in Peoria, Illinois, once known as a “sundown town.” The man said, “A lot of you know I’ve been having issues with Irene [the Black woman who planned the event]. I’ve been saying that Black people should pull themselves up from their bootstraps. Now I realize that many didn’t have shoes.”

Irene responded that she feels as if God is using the Juneteenth: Faith and Freedom documentary and Juneteenth observations to “do an Azusa Street movement,” referring to the 1906 spiritual revival in Los Angeles, California, led by William J. Seymour, a Black preacher.

The revival sparked a multicultural Pentecostalism movement that has spread around the world.