In 2021, a 94-year-old woman from Fort Worth, Texas, walked through the East Wing of the White House to watch a president sign Juneteenth into law. That wing is now a pile of rubble, awaiting transformation into a fortified ballroom, and the president who welcomed her is no longer in office. Yet Opal Lee, the “Grandmother of Juneteenth,” remains a living witness to the distance between a holiday’s creation and the unfinished work it commemorates. A new graphic novel, First Freedom, traces her journey from a childhood in the segregated South, through a 1,400-mile walking campaign at the age of 89, to that moment in the White House—a story now circulating in a format designed to reach readers who were not yet born when she began her march.

Lee’s campaign drew on a history that is itself a study in delay. On 19 June 1865, Union troops reached Galveston, Texas, and read General Orders No. 3, informing enslaved people of their freedom two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation. The date became a grassroots celebration, sustained for generations by Black communities in Texas and beyond, long before Texas made it a state holiday in 1980 or Congress acted in 2021. That federal designation arrived in the wake of the racial justice protests of 2020, and it was, as Joe Biden said then, an effort to “embrace” painful moments. Viewed from Berlin, however, the holiday now sits in an uneasy political landscape: Donald Trump, who once claimed to have made Juneteenth “very famous,” has since complained of too many non-working holidays and, according to German press reports, used his own birthday—Flag Day, 14 June—to grant free national park entry while cancelling the same perk on Juneteenth.

The tension between recognition and erosion runs through this year’s observances. In Washington, federal offices and the Postal Service are closed, and the stock market is silent—a fact noted in São Paulo, where the holiday emptied the global economic calendar. But the closures are only a surface indicator. A coalition of civil rights advocates, including the late Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, long insisted that Juneteenth must be paired with H.R. 40, the reparations study commission that has stalled in Congress for decades. At the United Nations, a recent vote affirmed that transatlantic slavery constituted a crime against humanity and called for reparatory justice, a position the U.S. delegation declined to support. From this vantage, the holiday is not a conclusion but a marker of what remains withheld.

Across the country, the day unfolds in multiple registers. In Galveston, the birthplace of the commemoration, Tommie D. Boudreaux of the African American Heritage Committee speaks of Black Americans having “played a major part of building America.” In cities from New York to Los Angeles, street festivals, concerts, and educational panels mix with cookouts where red foods—barbecue, watermelon, red velvet cake—symbolise the bloodshed of ancestors. The National Park Service offers free entry to all its sites, a gesture that, for the first time since federal recognition, extends the holiday’s reach to public lands. Yet the MSNBC commentator Rev. Al Sharpton frames the moment as a “defining hour,” warning that old fights over voting rights and representation have acquired “new machinery.”

First Freedom, the graphic novel, closes with Lee’s White House visit, but its publication in 2026 arrives in a different America. The Supreme Court that once unanimously affirmed equal rights in Brown v. Board of Education has, according to American legal analysts, delivered a major victory to opponents of the Voting Rights Act. The East Wing is rubble. And on the holiday itself, a 99-year-old woman in Fort Worth can still recall the night in 1939 when a white mob burned her family’s home to the ground—and the decades she spent insisting that the nation remember. The book’s final image is not the signing ceremony, but Lee’s face, looking out from the page, as if waiting for the rest of the story to be written.