06/19/2026
161 years ago—less than two lifetimes—June 19th marked the day that the news of emancipation spread to enslaved Black people in Texas… two full months after the Civil War ended. PSU celebrates the snuffing out of that brutal chapter in US history, but, echoing W. E.B. Du Bois (our library’s namesake) in the above quote, recognize that our country is far from free today, and we have a lot of collective work to do to get there.
Du Bois was an adamant proponent of collective bargaining and union struggle, but also a vocal critic of the racism that’s all too common in union organizing. We must all at PSU follow in his footsteps and continue to combat our own biases. We will never achieve a liberated and antiracist world if we don’t start by striving to make our union antiracist—by creating inclusive spaces for all of our members across identity, bargaining against bias in discipline, and combatting our university’s complicity in the many echoes of chattel slavery that the US continues to participate in, from mass incarceration and racist kidnapping to genocidal foreign wars.
May Juneteenth be a reminder both of how far we’ve come and how far we have yet to go. No one is free until we are all free.