The ceremony is not the assignment

(Eds. note: This column, one of my favorite so far this year, fell through the cracks. )

Juneteenth is often treated as a question of recognition: who marks it, who proclaims it, who posts about it and who appears in the photo. The tension is that recognition can become a substitute for the work remembrance should create. My latest Dallas Morning News column begins with Southlake because that is where the lesson found me.

Three years ago, activists questioned why I had not pushed the city to celebrate Juneteenth. Their case for recognition was stronger than I first understood. A holiday tied to freedom delayed deserves public memory. Public memory does real work when history has been kept out of the official record.

But, the mechanism breaks when communities treat visible ritual as the whole proof of civic seriousness. Local politics already rewards this mistake. It gives attention to statements, ceremonies, posts and symbolic fights while missing the slower labor that strengthens schools, families, neighborhoods and trust.

Leaders learn to perform what communities reward. Then residents then complain when public life fills with people more skilled at signaling concern than carrying responsibility.

“Local politics rewards this mistake all the time. By the time those residents were questioning my silence, I had spent years doing the quiet work — in schools, with families, in the places where better is actually built. None of it fit a Facebook complaint thread. Only a public proclamation would have counted.

“But this isn’t simply about Juneteenth. Local communities get what they reward, and our leaders are the proof.

“We complain about school boards that chase cultural fights, council members who confuse attention with leadership and officials who value social media followers more than results. Then we reward exactly that. Ceremony is easy to see; the slow work that changes how a place runs leaves nothing to point at. Even a holiday like Juneteenth gets reduced to the spectacle around it.”

The assignments after the ceremony:

• Teach the history.

• Serve the community.

• Build institutions worthy of the people being remembered.

Freedom delayed deserves celebration, but staged reverence cannot be where the work ends. It never was for me.

Read the full column: Smith: Juneteenth asks more of us than a ceremony

I first wrote about Juneteenth in 2024: “Confessions: From unaware to informed about Juneteenth Discovering the significance of America’s second Independence Day”