This week’s reflection is by The Rev. Adrienne Reedy a gifted artist, writer, and member of the Cornelius Corps Board of Directors. Please take the time to read and reflect on her heartfelt and challenging insights about the recent Juneteenth national holiday. It reminds us that healing is only possible by facing and reckoning with the depth of our nation’s racial wounds.
Peace – Jim Melson
Juneteenth: The Wound That Won’t Be Allowed to Heal
Two and a half years.
That is how long enslaved people were kept in bondage after they were legally declared
free. Not because the law had not changed. It had. But because those in power decided
that the truth was not urgent enough to deliver. That Black freedom could wait a little longer.
One hundred and sixty-one years later, I am still watching Black freedom wait.
Juneteenth arrived this year wrapped in a particular kind of sting. While this nation threw itself a 250th birthday party, a man stood in the glow of a national spotlight — breathless from victory, name of God still warm on his lips — and told the world that Michelle Obama is a man. And the world kept spinning. No silence. No reckoning. Just another thing we are expected to swallow and move past by morning.
I cannot move past it. Not because the lie was convincing. It was not. But because of what it revealed — that there is still no floor. That a Black woman, no matter how accomplished, no matter how dignified, no matter how much grace she poured into spaces that were never built for her, can be stripped of her humanity in front of millions and the moment will be laughed off, scrolled past, or worse, celebrated.
Michelle Obama was First Lady of the United States. She is a Harvard-educated lawyer. She is someone’s mother, someone’s daughter, someon’s pride. And none of that mattered in that moment. What mattered was that she was Black and she was a woman— and in this country, that combination has always made you a target.
That is what I am sitting with this Juneteenth. Not just the spectacle of one man’s cruelty, but the silence of everyone else. The silence that co-signs. The silence that signals that Black women’s dignity is still negotiable. Still optional. Still something we’ll get around to protecting eventually.
We are moving backward and calling it freedom. History is being erased from classrooms. DEI programs are being gutted. The language of equity is being treated like a threat. And on the eve of a holiday meant to honor Black liberation, a fighter thanks God and then uses his breath — the same breath — to demean a Black woman on the largest stage available to him.
I keep asking myself why this particular moment will not leave me. And I think it is
because it felt like a summary. A single, ugly sentence that captured exactly where we are: a nation that will put Black culture on a pedestal and Black people in their place in the same breath.
Juneteenth was never just a celebration. It was always a reckoning — a reminder that
freedom announced is not freedom delivered. That justice delayed is not an accident but a decision. I celebrate the survival of my people. I honor the bones this day was built on. But I will
not dress a wound in a flag and call it healed. We are not healed. And pretending otherwise is its own kind of chains.
A Prayer for the Unhealed Wound
Lord, God of the Oppressed,
We come to You carrying the heavy truth that the road to real freedom is still long, and the wounds of Your children are still deep. We thank You for the strength and survival of the ancestors who built the ground we stand on, but we refuse to pretend that a surface-level peace is enough.
Forgive the silence that co-signs cruelty, and convict the hearts of those who use their breath to tear down dignity instead of building justice. Give us the courage to speak when the world stays quiet, and the
endurance to keep demanding the freedom that was promised.
Do not let us grow weary, and do not let us accept a false healing. Keep our hearts restless until Your justice flows like waters, and Your righteousness like a mighty stream.
In Your holy and sustaining name,
Amen.
Jeremiah 6:14
“They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious. ‘Peace, Peace’, they say, when there is no peace.”