5 Movies and TV Shows to Watch to Better Understand Juneteenth
Juneteenth is celebrated across the United States each year on June 19, thought it hasn’t always received the recognition it deserves. The holiday commemorates the day in 1865 when Union soldiers announced to enslaved people in Texas that they had been freed, more than two years after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.
Former President Joe Biden signed a bill in 2021 that made Juneteenth a federal holiday. However, before June 19 was recognized in that official capacity, visual media and pop culture highlighted the holiday in TV shows and movies, expanding the larger understanding of its importance in American history.
The Hollywood Reporter has assembled a list of five movies and TV shows to watch to better understand the meaning and significance of Juneteenth.
Channing Godfrey Peoples’ 2020 film follows Turquoise Jones (Nicole Beharie), a single Fort Worth mother who wants her daughter, Kai (Alexis Chikaeze), to compete in the Miss Juneteenth pageant that she herself won years ago. While Kai has little interest in competing, she does so to appease her mother, who wants her to win because the top prize includes a full scholarship to any traditionally Black educational institution.
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In his review of Miss Juneteenth, THR’s chief film critic David Rooney wrote, “Through the holiday for which the pageant is named … the movie also acknowledges generations of African American women who have strived for dignity and personhood in environments that often hold them back.”
In October 2017, the season four premiere of Black-ish aired. The episode, titled “Juneteenth,” had a musical spin, which saw the Johnsons attend their twins’ school play that is centered around Columbus Day. However, Dre (Anthony Anderson) is taken aback by the inaccurate historical portrayal in the story and enlists Aloe Blacc to create a song to honor Juneteenth.
Black-ish creator Kenya Barris told THR the next year that former ABC exec Vicki Dummer had approached him with concerns about the episode making the “white audience uncomfortable.” Despite this, they went forward with “Juneteenth,” and it became a hit.
“I was like, ‘Vicki, you mean the episode about how talking about slavery makes white people uncomfortable makes white people uncomfortable?’ And we laughed at the fuckin’ irony of it,” he said. “We ultimately showed it and it was a well-received episode, but she was doing her job and that’s a network fight.”
The episode was so popular — and ahead of the curve — it was announced in 2018 that a stage musical based on the episode was in the works. Barris was set to write alongside Peter Saji while Pharrell Williams was attached to write, produce and compose the music, though the adaptation has yet to see the light of day.
In his 2018 story announcing the stage production, THR‘s David Rooney wrote of the episode, “The subversively funny, sharply double-edged episode became an instant classic, cleverly linking 21st-century African-American middle-class reality to the country’s brutal past of exploitation and suffering.”
Both he and Barris also noted that after the episode aired, Juneteenth showed up on Apple’s iCal, even before it became a federal holiday.
During the ninth episode of Atlanta’s first season, Earn (Donald Glover) and Van (Zazie Beetz) attend a Juneteenth party hosted by an interracial couple. The husband, Craig (Rick Holmes), appears to be obsessed with Black history while simultaneously stereotyping and ridiculing it on a day intended for celebration. (For reference, drink options at the party include “Underground Rumroad” and “Plantation Master Poison.”)
In a June 19, 2020 edition of THR chief TV critic Dan Fienberg’s “Now See This” newsletter, this episode of Atlanta is regarded as a “worthwhile starting point” in TV’s recognition of Juneteenth.
Also hailing from Barris, #blackAF stars the Black-ish creator as a fictionalized version of himself, or as THR’s Dan Fienberg puts it, “blackAF is either caustically self-lacerating or bleakly disingenuous about the idea of ‘Kenya Barris’ as a character.”
In the third episode, the family prepares for a Juneteenth party. While both #blackAF and Black-ish‘s Juneteenth episodes have different storylines and meanings, Fienberg pointed out Black-ish also covered the holiday, writing, “So if the tackling of representations of Black success, sexualizing of young black women and celebration of Juneteenth feel like things Black-ish would do or has done, that’s the point.”
High on the Hog differs from these entries mostly because it’s a docuseries centered around African American cuisine. Episode by episode, the series “highlights the ingenuity of African American cuisine, examines its past and celebrates its future,” THR’s arts and culture critic Lovia Gyarkye wrote in her review of the show. The TV series was notably inspired by Jessica B. Harris’ novel of the same name.
“In one particularly moving scene, host Stephen Satterfield and Harris travel to the former slave port of Ouidah to honor the enslaved people who died before their journey to the Americas,” Gyarkye wrote. “Standing atop the mass grave, Harris explains what the slaves were typically given to eat — a sauce made of palm oil, flour and pepper — and how white colonizers tried to force-feed them when they refused. ‘The only power the newly enslaved had was the power of refusal,’ Harris says. ‘Resistance was every step of the journey.’”
