Why 12 more names were added to the Central Library atrium

You'll notice a dozen new names on the walls the next time you step into the Central Library's atrium.
Why it matters: The 12 influential authors memorialized in the downtown library represent the next step in an initiative to shine a light on the literary contributions of marginalized creators.
Driving the news: The second phase of the Central Authors Project finished late last month with a renovation of the glass-enclosed public space.
Prior to the project's launch, the Central Library walls housed the names of 83 esteemed figures throughout history, with the first names engraved in 1917 and additions made in 2007.
Yes, but: Just five of the people included were women, and none were people of color.
Flashback: Planning for the Central Authors Project began in 2021 when Indianapolis native and longtime library patron Michael Twyman encouraged the IndyPL to make the lineup more inclusive and provided funding to make it happen.
Phase one added the names of 10 Black American authors to the library walls in spring 2022.
What they're saying: "Public libraries have the power to shape our community's cultural and intellectual life by curating, sharing and telling stories," Twyman said in a statement. "I am so proud to have been part of this historic project to increase the diversity of authors represented in Central Library's architecture."
How it works: Authors were nominated by library visitors and the Indianapolis community at large.

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18 hours ago

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Parties and proclamations: Juneteenth across the diaspora

Hello and welcome to The Long Wave. I'm Adria R Walker, a Mississippi-based race and equity reporter for the Guardian US, and I'm excited to be taking over this week. I've been working on a story about the ways Black American communities have celebrated – in many cases, for centuries – the formal end of slavery, which is variously called Emancipation Day, Freedom Day, Jubilee Day and, perhaps most famously, Juneteenth. My article will be published on 19 June, Juneteenth, a federal holiday that was enshrined into law four years ago. In doing this reporting, I've learned a lot about the holiday that I grew up celebrating. For this week's edition of the newsletter, I'll guide you through what Emancipation Day can look like in the US and its legacy. In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln signed the emancipation proclamation, which abolished slavery in the states that had seceded during the civil war, though slavery was abolished nationwide when the 13th amendment was ratified on 6 December 1865. News of the proclamation spread varyingly. Some southern enslavers attempted to outrun the order and the Union soldiers who brought news of it, moving the people they had enslaved farther and farther west until the army caught up with them. In Galveston, Texas, it was not until 19 June 1865 that people who were enslaved found out about the declaration. News of that freedom was enshrined in Juneteenth, celebrated annually by Galvestonians and nearby Houstonians. While Juneteenth has become the most famous emancipation celebration, it is far from the only one. I had the idea for the story a couple of years ago, on 8 May 2023, when I became curious about how communities across the south celebrated emancipation historically and in the present day. On that day, the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, one of the Two Mississippi Museums in Jackson, my home town, had shared a newspaper clipping on Instagram about a historic Emancipation Day celebration on 8 May. The 8 May celebrations, which are still observed by the Mississippi School of Mathematics and Science and the local community, began in 1865, when Union soldiers arrived in Columbus to inform the enslaved people that they were free. Elsewhere, 8 August commemmorates the day the former president Andrew Johnson manumitted (freed) the people he had enslaved – the emancipation proclamation had not applied to Tennessee or West Virginia. William Isom, the director of Black in Appalachia, tells me that Samuel Johnson, a formerly enslaved person, is credited with the spread of 8 August celebrations. In Florida, the day is celebrated on 20 May, honouring that date in 1865 when Union troops read and enforced the emancipation proclamation at the end of the civil war. In Gallia County, Ohio, they have marked 22 September 1862, the day on which Lincoln drafted the emancipation proclamationsince 1863 – making it one of the longest-running emancipation celebrations in the country, Isom says. Some communities have celebrated 1 January since 1863, when Lincoln signed the proclamation, while others celebrate 31 December, or Watch Night, when enslaved and freed Black Americans gathered to hear news of the emancipation proclamation. Watch Night is still observed in Black communities across the south, including in the Carolinas, where Gullah Geechee people observe Freedom's Eve, and elsewhere. As a child, I attended Watch Night services at church in Mississippi, though I didn't appreciate the significance at the time. Whenever and wherever slavery was abolished, formerly enslaved people observed and celebrated the day – this is consistent across the African diaspora. I knew about Emancipation Day festivities in the Caribbean and in Canada, for example, though they are different from those in the US, but I didn't know such celebrations extended to the northern US. In Massachusetts, Emancipation Day, also known as Quock Walker Day, is on 8 July. Quock Walker, born in 1753, sued for and won his freedom in 1781. His case is considered to have helped abolish slavery in Massachusetts. In New York State, the Fifth of July was first celebrated in 1827, an event first held the day after full emancipation was achieved there. After the British empire ended slavery in 1838, many areas in the north began to observe 1 August. In Washington DC, on 16 April, people commemorate the anniversary of the 1862 signing of the District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act, which abolished slavery and freed about 3,000 people in the capital. Under the act, former enslavers were compensated for the people they had enslaved, a common practice during efforts to end slavery around the world. However, the people who had been enslaved did not receive compensation. I vaguely remember attending my first Juneteenth celebration as a little girl. Farish Street, a historic Black district in Jackson, was abuzz with people. Despite it being the middle of summer in Mississippi, the heat didn't stop folks from coming out to eat, dance and socialise. The state is relatively close to Texas – it is about a six-hour drive from Jackson to Houston – so we have quite a bit of cultural overlap. It made sense that we would share holidays. Like many other cultural traditions, Juneteenth spread across the country with the arrival of southern people during the great migration. In the decades since, Juneteenth has been catapulted from a local or regional event to a national and international one – last year, for example, I was invited to attend a Juneteenth event in Toronto, Canada. Other emancipation commemorations travelled, too. The 8 August celebrations, for example, moved throughout Appalachia, through coal country and into urban metropolises such as Chicago, Indianapolis and Detroit. Historically, the holiday included celebratory aspects – eating traditional foods, hosting libations, singing, dancing and playing baseball – but also a tangible push for change. Celebrants would gather to find family members from whom they had been separated during slavery, attend lectures and advocate for education, and practise harnessing their political power – something that was particularly relevant in the reconstruction days. For Isom, Juneteenth can become a day that the entire country comes together to celebrate freedom, while communities' specific emancipation celebrations can be hyper-local and hyper-specific. 'Even in [places] where there's not necessarily many Black folks at all, they're having the Juneteenth events,' he says. 'And so the local celebrations – like for here, 8 August or 22 September – that's where I feel like communities can showcase and celebrate their own cultures and traditions around Emancipation Day. We need both.' To receive the complete version of The Long Wave in your inbox every Wednesday, please subscribe here.

Newsweek

3 days ago

• Newsweek

Juneteenth Is Under Attack Because It Tells the Truth About Power

On Dec. 21, 1848, two people boarded a train in Macon, Ga., beginning a journey to Philadelphia. They were traveling together, but laws, particularly slave codes, made it so they needed to sit in separate cars. To others on the train, everything seemed relatively normal. In their eyes, a white man with an injured arm and bandages on his face had boarded the train with his dark-skinned slave. He sat down in the comfortable "whites only" section while his devoted slave, assured that his "master" was relaxed, proceeded to the crowded "negro" car to find his seat. On a surface level, the traveling pair symbolized differences in the life experiences of Black men versus white men. At each stop on their four-day journey, the Black man was degraded and sent away to eat and sleep where he would not be seen and where conditions would be subpar. The white man, on the other hand, traveled in luxury, welcomed with sympathy. In other words, one of the two travelers was seen as a human being with rights to live freely and make their own decisions, to be treated with dignity and care; the other was either infantilized at best or completely dehumanized. A Juneteenth flag waves in front of the main door of the Department of Commerce, on June 21, 2024. A Juneteenth flag waves in front of the main door of the Department of Commerce, on June 21, 2024. Getty Images What the people they encountered were unaware of was that this duo was relying on the assumptions of their time, the prejudices of their contemporaries, and the dictates of the status quo for far more than a medical trip. They were heading to Philadelphia in search of freedom from it all, to release the chains of captivity that bound them, and to escape the cruel, inhumane practice of slavery. This quest was not solely for the liberation of William Craft, the Black man. It was also for his wife, an enslaved woman named Ellen, who cut her hair to neck length, sewed herself a pair of men's trousers, and wore a hat and glasses to conceal her identity. The couple knew that if Ellen were to pose as a white man she would be required to sign documents on behalf of her "slave," but because both of them had been restricted by law from learning to read or write, they wrapped her arm in bandages and feigned an injury. As we celebrate Juneteenth this year, all while facing the attempted erasure of this important day on behalf of our current administration, the true story of Ellen and William Craft reveals far more than historical injustice. It shows us how the desire to eliminate the day that commemorates Black American freedom is an attempt to uphold a social order that relies on categorizing human beings based on skin color and sex, a social order that I refer to as American patriarchy. American patriarchy is a system that has long defined national identity by the dominance of white, cisgender, straight, able-bodied men. This ideology has always relied on the exclusion, suppression, and erasure of other histories. Their story reminds us that understanding and resisting American patriarchy is essential if we hope to create something new. The Craft's ability to run to freedom in this way displayed a mastery of a book they had been forced to study all their life. Ellen knew her character well because her survival had already depended on it long before she cut her hair and sewed her pants. She had picked up the knowledge she needed to turn American patriarchy into her escape, by observing those who called themselves her masters. She had been forced to learn the intricacies of American patriarchy from the moment she was born, to examine those who aimed to oppress her down to the smallest of details. Once fluent in their ways, with the story of American patriarchy memorized, she transferred it beautifully into her four-day journey as a white man. This is why knowledge of Juneteenth, Black Independence Day, is under attack: it threatens the story that power must remain unchallenged. When we know stories like those of Ellen and William Craft, we know how far we have come, we know we cannot ever stop being keenly aware of what we are facing, and we know we must use that knowledge to escape the traps of American patriarchy. When Juneteenth and all the stories it carries are erased from our institutions, it is not because they are unimportant; it is because they threaten a narrative that insists power must remain concentrated and historical accountability avoided. Juneteenth is a reminder of a different legacy, one of resistance, survival, and the persistent redefinition of what this country can become. Recognizing Juneteenth, defending its place in our national consciousness, is not just about honoring the past. It is about being fully aware of what we are up against and choosing the kind of future we are willing to fight for. Anna Malaika Tubbs is a scholar, advocate, and two time bestselling author currently making headlines for her newest release Erased: What American Patriarchy Has Hidden from Us. The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.

Yahoo

06-06-2025

• Yahoo

On This Day, June 6: YMCA founded in London

On this date in history: In 1844, the Young Men's Christian Association -- YMCA -- was founded in London. In 1872, feminist Susan B. Anthony was fined for voting in an election in Rochester, N.Y. She refused to pay the fine and a judge allowed her to go free. In 1933, the first drive-in movie theater opened -- in Camden, N.J. In 1944, hundreds of thousands of Allied troops began crossing the English Channel in the D-Day invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe. It was the largest invasion in history. In 1966, James Meredith, who in 1962 became the first Black American to attend the University of Mississippi, was shot by a sniper during a civil rights "March Against Fear" walk in the South. Meredith was hospitalized and recovered from his wounds, later rejoining the long march, which he had originated. In 1968, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, Democratic presidential candidate and former U.S. attorney general, died the day after he was struck by an assassin's bullets in California. He was 42. In 1972, a coal mine explosion in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), trapped 464 miners underground. More than 425 people died. In 1981, a train conductor braked too hard to avoid hitting a cow, causing several cars in his train to slip off the tracks in rainy weather. The cars slid off a bridge into a swollen river, drowning an estimated 600 people in India. In 1982, thousands of Israeli forces pushed deep into Lebanon in an effort to defeat Palestinian guerrillas sheltering in the southern border region and near the capital of Beirut. Syria said its forces joined the fighting in a major escalation of the conflict. In 1993, the Guatemalan legislature elected Ramiro de Leon Carpio as president to replace ousted leader Jorge Serrano. In 2001, a man drove his pickup truck into a Muslim family of Pakistani heritage, killing four and injuring one in London, Ontario, Canada. The driver was charged with terroristic murder and accused of targeting the family because of their religion. In 2023, Prince Harry became the first member of the British royal family to give testimony during a court proceeding since 1891. He sued Mirror Group Newspapers, accusing them of illegally hacking. In February 2024, Prince Harry won a "substantial" settlement in the case.