ACR Health Honors Juneteenth
by Cheyenne Rainford, with contributions from Ronald Flanagan & Nicole Woolridge
On Saturday, June 15, at Clinton Square in downtown Syracuse, ACR Health celebrated Juneteenth with a sexual health education outreach event.
Mens’ High Impact Prevention Specialist, Ronald Flanagan, and Womens’ Intervention Specialist, Nicole Woolridge distributed informational brochures about sexually transmitted infections (STIs), including HIV, and how to prevent them.
Visitors to the ACR Health table received free gifts, business cards, and service guides to help them stay connected to the agency should they ever require ACR Health services.
“[We] also handed out a lot of safe sex kits with our free and confidential service cards,” said Woolridge. “We discussed PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis) and [people] were very surprised to hear about [it].”
The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History & Culture (NMAAHC) explains the significance of Juneteenth as a kind of second Independence Day in the U.S. On Jan. 2, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation into law. Often, students in the U.S. are taught that this marked the end of slavery in this country.
The reality is that the Emancipation Proclamation “could not be implemented in places still under Confederate control,” reads the NMAAHC’s Juneteenth web page. “… in the westernmost Confederate state of Texas, enslaved people would not be free until much later.”
On Jun. 19, 1865, nearly two and a half years after Lincoln’s executive decree, 250,000 enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, “the last bastion for slavery during the final days of the Civil War,” were finally set free, confirms an article from University of South Florida at St. Petersburg (USF).
The USF article further notes that “in 1980, Texas became the first to make [Juneteenth] a state holiday,” though it wasn’t until 2021 that it was recognized as a national holiday. Black communities across the country honor the day in many ways. For some, it is a day of somber remembrance. For others, it is a celebration of freedom and civil rights progress.