As part of its Juneteenth celebration, the Embrace Ideas Festival on Thursday welcomed Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson as its keynote speaker for a discussion on the power of telling the hard truth of Black history and culture in America.
“We are the stories that we tell ourselves,” said Wilkerson, who was greeted with a standing ovation by the audience at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
Their powerful impact is why she has devoted her life to clarifying, researching and telling stories that have not been told before, said Wilkerson, author of the best-selling book “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.”
Wilkerson reflected on the fraught narrative surrounding Juneteenth and its origins. She said that there has been a popular mischaracterization that the holiday marks the last day that enslaved people learned that they had been freed. The narrative, she said, puts the onus of freedom on them, not those responsible for their bondage.
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Juneteenth, the newest federal holiday celebrated on June 19, marks the day Union soldiers arrived in Texas and required that the state enforce the Emancipation Proclamation, liberating captive slaves, she explained.
Wilkerson also spoke of the ways in which what she describes as the US’s caste system still plagues American society today, pointing to the continued police brutality that threatens Black lives.
She likened the US to an old, deteriorating house, with the people as its heirs. Choosing to ignore its issues, she said, does nothing to remedy them. “Whatever is lurking will fester whether you choose to look or not,” said Wilkerson, who is also the author of “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent.”
“Any further deterioration is, in fact, totally on us,” she added.
Wilkerson’s address followed discussions and presentations exploring themes of Black culture in education and the parallels of Queer and Black Liberation during the third day of the festival organized by Embrace Boston. The nonprofit built the memorial on Boston Common for Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, a sculpture inspired by a photo of the couple in a loving embrace. It was dedicated in January 2023.
Embrace Boston has since grown into a “movement to ensure that Boston is the epicenter where belonging, anti-racism and culture, particularly BIPOC culture, particularly Black culture, can thrive and flourish,” said Imari K. Paris Jeffries, president and chief executive officer of Embrace Boston.
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The organization aims to achieve this goal through the promotion of arts and culture, as well as research and policy initiatives. The ideas festival grew out of an impromptu gathering for a film showing in Nubian Square in Roxbury in 2021. The festival started the next year with the goal of creating a recognition of the holiday, Jeffries said.
“When you think about a holiday like Juneteenth that centers the emancipation of Black folks, but also the full liberation of all Americans, many people don’t know what to do,” said Jeffries, adding the organization hopes to center Black music, Black ideas, and Black joy in Juneteenth celebrations.
Carolyn Grimes, who oversees community leadership for the United Way of Massachusetts Bay, said she has enjoyed listening to different speaker’s ideas and reflecting on the future of diversity, equity, and inclusion. “I think it’s really great to be looking forward but also to be looking back at where we’ve come from,” Grimes said.
The festival concludes on Friday with a third day of activities, including a block party in the parking lot at Roxbury Community College at 3 p.m., according to its website.
Helena Getahun-Hawkins can be reached at helena.getahunhawkins@globe.com.