JUNE 19, 2026 - SAN FRANCISCO, CA - Periodically, our committees publish opinion pieces and articles related to various holidays, local programs, and initiatives of relevance to Queen’s Bench Bar Association. Our Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (“DEIB”) chair Alexandra Sepolen shares reflections on Juneteenth and the holiday’s ties to the Bay Area and the legal profession.

Since June 19, 2021, Juneteenth National Independence Day has been recognized as a federal holiday. As we enter the fifth year of the holiday’s recognition, our committee is reminded that Juneteenth is both a celebration and a charge. While it celebrates the end of slavery in the United States, it also serves as a sobering reminder that justice is not self-executing. Rights written on paper do not enforce themselves, and freedom declared is not always freedom delivered. For lawyers, judges, and legal professionals, that distinction is not symbolic. It is central to our work.

 

Background and History

On June 19, 1865, Union Major General Gordon Granger issued General Order No. 3 in Galveston, Texas, informing the people of Texas that enslaved people were free. The date became known as Juneteenth, one of the oldest commemorations of the end of slavery in the United States. 

However, this announcement followed over two years of delay. President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, but emancipation depended on military victory, enforcement, and constitutional change. The Thirteenth Amendment was later passed by Congress on January 31, 1865, and ratified on December 6, 1865, formally abolishing slavery in the United States, except as punishment for crime where a person has been duly convicted.  

Juneteenth marks more than delayed news. It marks the failings associated with delayed enforcement, exposing the gap between legal promise and lived reality. To this day, that gap remains one of the defining concerns of the legal profession.

 

Bay Area’s Connection to Juneteenth

Juneteenth’s connection to the Bay Area is not incidental. It came here through migration. During the Second Great Migration, Black families left Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Mississippi, and other parts of the South through “liberty trains” in search of safety, work, dignity, and opportunity. The Bay Area became a major destination during World War II, when shipyards and defense industries transformed the region. According to the National Park Service, the Bay Area’s African American population rose from fewer than 20,000 in 1940 to more than 60,000 in 1945, with shipbuilding jobs serving as the primary driver of that migration.  

Migrants did not arrive empty-handed. They brought family recipes, church traditions, mutual aid networks, music, political consciousness, and memories of  emancipation delayed, rights denied, and freedom celebrated anyway. Movement to the Bay Area was not solely economic; it was relocation motivated by a desire for freedom.

For me, this history is personal. As a Louisiana Creole woman with family roots in Texas, Juneteenth is not an abstract federal holiday. It carries generations of family history and a broader story of Black families who moved west seeking safety, work, dignity, and a future. Families like mine brought Southern history with them. They brought food, language, faith, music, family networks, and a deep understanding that enduring and surviving in the face of uncertainty, violence, and conflict is an act of resistance.

When Black Southerners migrated west, they did not leave their history behind. They carried it here and helped build the Bay Area. San Francisco’s Juneteenth history particularly reflects that migration directly. In 1945, Wesley Johnson, a native Texan and San Francisco State alumnus, created what became one of the longest continuously running Juneteenth celebrations in the United States. He announced the celebration by riding a white stallion through the Fillmore District and inviting people to gather at his nightclub.  

That image is unforgettable: a Texan in San Francisco, riding through Fillmore with a call to action. the community together to remember freedom. It captures the Bay Area’s Juneteenth story in one scene. Juneteenth traveled from Galveston to San Francisco through Black families, workers, entrepreneurs, veterans, artists, church members, and community leaders. It took root in Fillmore, in Oakland, in Richmond, in Bayview-Hunters Point, and across the East Bay.

Bay Area Black history is also ingrained in Bay Area legal history. During World War II, Black workers helped build the wartime economy, but they did so while confronting segregation, employment discrimination, unsafe working conditions, housing exclusion, and unequal treatment under law. In 1944, an explosion at the Port Chicago Naval Magazine in Contra Costa County, now known as the Port Chicago disaster, killed 320 people. Many of those killed were Black sailors assigned to dangerous ammunition-loading work. After the disaster, Black sailors who refused to return to unsafe conditions were prosecuted. Fifty were convicted of mutiny. Decades later, on July 17, 2024, and shortly before Juneteenth, the Secretary of the Navy exonerated 256 defendants from the 1944 Port Chicago courts-martial after a review found significant legal errors, including improper joint trials and denial of a meaningful right to counsel.  

That is a Bay Area Juneteenth lesson in its starkest form: legal systems can perpetuate injustice, and legal advocacy can help correct it, but sometimes only after generations of harm.

 

How Juneteenth Informs Legal Practice

Juneteenth is deeply relevant to practicing law in the Bay Area. The holiday reminds us to examine whether our systems deliver what they promise and to act to correct course when it does not. It asks whether a right exists only in theory, or whether people can actually use it.

In criminal law, that question appears in challenges to racially biased policing, charging, conviction, and sentencing. California Penal Code section 745, also known as the California Racial Justice Act, provides that the state may not seek or obtain a conviction, or seek, obtain, or impose a sentence, on the basis of race, ethnicity, or national origin. It also allows courts to consider evidence including statistical evidence, aggregate data, expert testimony, and evidence of systemic and institutional bias, and provides that a defendant need not prove intentional discrimination.  

However, Juneteenth is not relevant only to criminal law. It is relevant to every practice area where the difference between formal rights and lived access matters.

• In housing, we evaluate whether families can remain in their communities. 
  
• In labor and employment law, we challenge whether a promise for work is real or performative. 
  
• In education, we consider whether children have equal access to safety, resources, and support. 
  
• In probate and estate planning, we evaluate whether families can protect and transfer generational wealth. 
  
• In immigration, it asks whether legal status and family unity are treated with humanity. 
  
• In family law, it asks whether clients can meaningfully obtain custody, support, and property orders without fear of violence.
  

As a family law attorney, this conceptualization in my practice is especially concrete. Freedom and equality are not abstractions for our clients navigating custody disputes, domestic violence, economic control, and support. A client’s ability to be heard may depend on whether they have counsel, whether they can afford filing fees, whether they have transportation, whether they are believed, whether trauma is understood, and whether the system recognizes the full context of their life. Juneteenth reminds us that legal rights mean little without access, enforcement, and dignity.

 

Impact on the Profession

Juneteenth also challenges the profession internally. The State Bar of California reported that Black adults are roughly 6 percent of California’s population but only 3.5 percent of California attorneys. People of color are 63 percent of the state’s adult population but only 36 percent of California’s active attorneys.  

The state’s justice gap is equally sobering. The State Bar’s 2024 Justice Gap Study found that Californians’ civil legal needs remain widespread and unmet, and that the supply of attorneys available to serve individual legal needs is insufficient to meet demand.  

Representation within the profession is not cosmetic. It affects trust, credibility, mentorship, judicial pipelines, client counseling, issue-spotting, and the public’s belief that the legal system belongs to everyone.

 

Calls to Action

For Queen’s Bench, Juneteenth also invites reflection on our own institutional history. Queen’s Bench Bar Association of the San Francisco Bay Area was formed in 1921 by women lawyers who were frustrated by resistance to their participation in the local bar association. Its history is rooted in the refusal to accept exclusion as normal.  An organization born from challenging exclusion has a particular obligation to recognize exclusion in all its forms. Gender equity cannot be separated from racial equity. The experiences of Black women lawyers, judges, litigants, students, clients, and community members must be centered and not treated as an afterthought to broader diversity work.

Our ethical obligations point in the same direction. California Rule of Professional Conduct 8.4.1 prohibits lawyers from unlawful harassment, discrimination, and retaliation in representing clients, refusing or terminating representation, and in law firm operations. But compliance is the floor. Juneteenth asks for more than compliance: it demands that community leaders, including our profession, practice courageously, confront institutional memory, and actively repair damage done.

For Bay Area lawyers, honoring Juneteenth can be practical. It can mean taking on pro bono work that expands access to housing, safety, benefits, family stability, and economic security. It can mean mentoring Black law students and young lawyers. It can mean supporting affinity bar associations and community organizations already doing important work related to racial justice and access to community resources. It can even mean something as simple as evaluating who receives opportunities in your firm, who gets credit for trial or hearing wins, who is interrupted in court, which witnesses we presume are credible, who is promoted, and who is missing from the room when decisions are made.

It can also mean learning local history well enough to understand that today’s legal problems are a product of institutional memory and history predating all of us. The Bay Area’s history of Black migration, labor, culture, displacement, resilience, and advocacy is interwoven into the fabric of the legal landscape we practice in every day.

Juneteenth is a day of joy, memory, and professional accountability. It reminds us that the law can announce freedom and still fail to deliver it. It reminds us that courts can ratify injustice and later be asked to repair it. It reminds us that communities carry memory long after institutions move on. As we move forward, let Juneteenth serve as reminder of our commitment to seizing the moment to advocate for ourselves and others, correct wrongs, and approach the work we do with dignity, empathy, and compassion for others.

All views expressed by the author and committee are their own and are not representative of the views of any firms or employers. None of the information in this article should be construed as legal advice.

The DEIB Committee is one of over ten active Queen’s Bench committees dedicated to promoting equality and opportunity for all. If you are interested in DEIB programming and initiatives, please contact deib@queensbench.org.