The Watson Foundation

We are still building FOOTPRINTS …. Tyler Perry 🎤❤️‼️

Larry Watson …. I grew up in The City of Columbus (MS) on the Northside of town where all the locals referred to as Memphistown. I was taught at a very young age at Hughes Elementary School that what the State of Mississippi teaches you early and without much ceremony, is the distance between what institutions declare and what they are willing to deliver are two totally different things .

The people I grew up around understood that distance intimately. They did not fight for an abstraction. They fought to hold the institutions of American governance accountable to obligations those institutions had already made. And they did that while living with the consequences of those same institutions falling short of administering a fair and just Society.Protecting and Embracing the less fortunate among us and empowering the disenfranchised,Disconnected and Disadvantaged.

Juneteenth is the holiday that makes that tension all the more visible and realistic for Black Folks.

What it marks is not simply the end of slavery. It marks the moment Union troops arrived in Galveston, Texas and the institutional presence finally existed to make a two-year-old declaration real on the ground. The obligation had already been made. What had been missing was the backing and the spine from the United States Government to enforce it.

But what followed reveals a more disturbing pattern. The commitment to Reconstruction came. Then the withdrawal of that commitment. Then the racial terror that filled the space where institutional backing had been.

That pattern is not history in the distant sense. It shows up in redistricted and gerrymandered maps.In a biased and conservative right wing United States Supreme Court !! In hiring decisions where your color or a name alone closes a door. In school funding formulas that make geography located in underserved communities A Health Hazard,In the professional risk of naming what everyone can see but few are willing to resource and be exposed to ridicule,humiliation,ostracism and termination.

Juneteenth does not mark a moment of arrival. It marks the moment a delayed obligation finally had to be acknowledged and accepted.

The question it puts before every generation of institutional leaders is the one Mississippi formed me to ask. Will we make good on our acknowledged constitutional obligations to equity, or will we repeat the pattern this day represents for too many generations that have preceded us !!!!

— with Larry Watson ⚖️ ✅ 🧳📚🕋‼️