Message Received: Juneteenth 2026

Published: June 19, 2026

Juneteenth marks the moment the last enslaved Americans learned they were free, two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation. The distance between declaration and delivery is, in many ways, the ongoing story of the struggle for justice and equity in the United States.

We are proud to work alongside so many clients doing the daily work of advancing social justice and building power in their communities. In that spirit, and ahead of Juneteenth, we wanted to share a piece from our founder that captures something essential about the gap between the ideals this country declared and the work that remains to make them real.

Let's get into it.

 

THE BATON AND THE PROMISE

Bill Burton recently got an early look at the soon-to-be-opened Obama Presidential Center. He called it "spectacular" but what struck him most wasn't the pageantry. It was the deeper story the Center chose to tell. Below, in his own words, Bill shares what he found inside, and what it made him think about as we mark Juneteenth and approach our nation's 250th birthday.

President Obama once said, “I’ve always described the presidency as a relay race. You take the baton from somebody, you run your leg as hard and as well as you can, and then you hand it off to somebody else.”

The Obama Center feels less like a monument to a man than a map of the course that baton has traveled.

Which brings me to something I've been reflecting on as we approach our nation's 250th birthday.

On July 4th, we don't celebrate the Battle of Yorktown or the Treaty of Paris or the day Britain surrendered. We celebrate the moment a group of imperfect people declared the aspiration of the country we are still fighting to be. The Declaration established the framework for the work that would follow, now for 250 years.

And that is the American story.

Our forebears declared that all men are created equal long before we were willing to treat all people as equal. And long before our government put women in that notion.

The constitution declared "We the People" long before our nation truly meant all of the people. And when President Lincoln declared that we must protect a "government of the people, by the people, and for the people," the definition of "the people" was pretty important in understanding that it wasn't all the people.

We have spent nearly 250 years arguing over those promises, expanding them, testing them, and struggling to live up to them. That tension between aspiration and reality sits at the heart of the story President Obama tells in his new Center.

As I was thinking about all of this, I found myself digging through some old campaign files. And, like most campaign veterans, I both kept far more than I should have and failed to save some important things I most certainly should have.

One thing I came across was a note from my father after he had met President Obama that memorialized a moment caught in this photo.

The president remarked to him how proud he must be that his son was on TV everyday speaking for the White House. Dad later told me somewhat sheepishly that his first instinct was to respond to him that he was pretty proud of President Obama, too. (In the email he referred to him as “young fellow.”)

That sounds like a joke, and in a way it was. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized he was expressing something much deeper.

My dad marched and protested in Buffalo in the 1960s when Barack Obama was still a child. Long before any of us could imagine a Black president, he was doing his own small part to widen the circle of “We the People.”

Standing next to President Obama years later, what he saw was not simply a politician who his kid worked for. He saw someone who had carried forward a piece of the work that his generation had worked on decades earlier.

He saw a piece of the American promise made more real than it had been before.

To read the full piece, visit Bill’s Substack here.

 

UNTIL NEXT TIME

The promise of Juneteenth has never been just about a single moment in history, it's about every generation that picks up the work and carries it forward. That's what Bill's dad understood standing next to a Black president. And it's what drives the work we do every day for candidates and communities whose stories deserve to be told fully.

Wishing you a powerful and meaningful Juneteenth tomorrow.

—Bryson Gillette