 Welcome to the first annual Essex Juneteenth celebration. So Juneteenth, as you know, is a bittersweet event, marking the lost enslaved people being informed over two months after the end of the Civil War in April 9th, 1865, and a full two years after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, that the items of slavery no longer bound them. They chose to celebrate and commemorate this day, June 19th, and so we are following a path laid for us. In the midst of so much going on in the world, in the U.S. and in our lives, I'm so pleased that you have chosen to take a few minutes out of your day to convene, to celebrate, and to appreciate the myriad contributions and ways that African American culture has enriched our lives, and to consider where we've been and where we're going as people. Lincoln Hughes. I too sing America. I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen when company comes, but I laugh and will eat well and grow strong. Tomorrow I'll be at the table when company comes. Nobody will dare say to me, eat in the kitchen then. Besides, they'll be ashamed. They'll be ashamed and see how beautiful we are. I am America. I too am America. Lynching is not dead. It's done in broad daylight under the hot lights of media frenzy for black blood, white guilt, white fear, and white acquittal, where brown boys are still expendable. Michael Vick should have had Zimmerman's lawyer. Brown boys are worth less than black dogs. Trayvon should have been a brown lab. Maybe then we'd see more of a humane society's presence. If poems could march in the streets, overturn verdicts, bring corrupt police to justice, they could bring a boy back his life and a mother back her son, a father back his boy, return bullets to a gun, unloose the lynch rope and unravel the knots from choked throats. We would not be choking on tears. When do our lives become valuable in the eyes of the law? When does hate cease to be exonerated behind a badge and lighter skin? There we go. They say we stand for nothing. There's no way we ever could. So we can't even wait in. Waiting on the world to change. Waiting on the world to change.