This Juneteenth, I’m Thinking About Sybby Grant

Today is Juneteenth — a federal holiday, a cultural flashpoint, and a deeply spiritual checkpoint for many of us. Its origins stretch back to Texas in 1865, where the final enslaved Black Americans learned of their freedom more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. Now, it’s marked nationwide with festivals, cookouts, music, and joy.

I love joy.

And while I celebrate, I also reflect.

I reflect on what Juneteenth means here, in Baltimore — a city that held one of the largest populations of free Black Americans before the Civil War. A city where abolitionist newspapers circulated, where Black schools were formed against all odds, and where enslaved labor was still used to build the very mansions that now host our city’s grandest institutions.

Just last weekend, I visited the Walters Art Museum, pulling my childhood friend along.

I just want to show you one thing, I told her.
I have to see it again.
And every time, though it makes me angry.

Inside the Walters, we walk through its beautifully curated rooms. And yet, despite the marble and majesty, a painful absence echoes louder than anything on display for me. Amid a museum built on 19th-century wealth — wealth intertwined with Confederate sympathies and slaveholding — there is almost no visible record of the Black Baltimoreans who lived, worked, and dreamed in that same era.

One exception: a single letter, written in 1861 by Sybby Grant, an enslaved cook in the Walters’ founding family’s household. In it, she writes with grace and culinary pride, even as she remains in bondage.

Every time I see it, I leave frustrated.
Frustrated for Sybby.
Her written legacy — of all things un-earthed — is a loving letter to her slave master?
Who, at the time, was in jail for agreeing she should remain a slave?

No portraits of her.
No images of free Black artisans.
No records of Black civic leaders.
No altar to the thousands of stories we’ll never read because they weren’t preserved, collected, or deemed worthy of display.

And I’m further gutted by the silence that surrounds her letter.

This is what erasure looks like in real time: when Black lives were not just stolen in labor but sidelined in memory. When the walls of our museums don’t reflect the sidewalks we walk every day — the ones our ancestors built, cleaned, bled on.

Baltimore is a city that helped shape American freedom. But in places that claim to honor history, it can feel as if Black Baltimoreans didn’t exist until the 20th century. That is not only inaccurate — it is unjust.

So yes, I’ll celebrate today.

But I’ll also reflect.
And I’ll remember that freedom — true freedom — isn’t just about the ending of bondage.
It’s about how we’re remembered.
It’s about whether our lives are deemed worthy of being displayed, studied, honored, and held in public memory.

📝 Reflection Prompt:
What stories of our city — your neighborhood, your lineage, your people — have been left out of the institutions that claim to represent history?
Where do you see yourself reflected… and where do you feel erased?

This week, take a walk through a museum, a monument, or a historic site near you. Look closely at what’s included — and just as closely at what’s missing. Then ask:
What would freedom look like if our full stories were told?