Juneteenth is a celebration, as well as a day to look toward academic achievement, especially math literacy.
Some things will drop out of the public eye and will go away, but there will always be science,engineering, and technology. And there will always, always be mathematics.”
— Katherine Johnson
Those celebrating Juneteenthknow that on June 19, 1865, Major General Gordon Granger stood in Galveston,Texas, and read General Order No. 3, announcing freedom to those still enslavedmore than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. That date became Juneteenth — celebrated informally for generations, made an official Texasholiday in 1980, and signed into law as the nation's eleventh federal holidayon June 17, 2021. Juneteenth marks more than a single day of delayednews; it is celebration and launching.
The Black Student Fund has urged recognition of the relationship between the Reconstruction-Era Juneteenth and current efforts toward Black math literacy for years. Mathematics offers one of the clearest windows into what that opportunity can look like when it's realized; SpaceX's recent IPO, built on the math of machine learning, attests to that. Black mathematicians have repeatedly achieved in math, from the colonial era through the Space Race. From Benjamin Banneker (inventor of the modern American clock) to Elbert Cox (first Black math PhD,1925), Euphemia Lofton Haynes (first Black woman math PhD, 1943), and DavidBlackwell, Black mathematicians havecontributed inventions and innovation to America often while barred fromuniversities, journals, and professional societies — evidence that the"want" of Black achievement was not, as Banneker argued to Thomas Jefferson,rooted in inability.
Consider J. Ernest Wilkins Jr., who entered the University of Chicago atthirteen and earned his PhD in mathematics at nineteen. Wilkins went on to workon the Manhattan Project, where he helped develop the Wigner-Wilkins approachthat became foundational to nuclear reactor design — work grounded in advancedmathematics that quite literally shaped the nuclear age. He later helped buildHoward University's doctoral program in mathematics, ensuring the nextgeneration had a place to train at the highest level.
David Blackwell built a parallel legacy in a different field entirely. Astatistician and mathematician, he co-developed the Rao–Blackwell theorem andbecame a foundational figure in game theory and Bayesian statistics — ideasthat now underpin economics, computer science, and decision theory. Hisinfluence was significant enough that, decades later, a major computing company(NVIDIA) named a GPU architecture in his honor.
The Washington, DC HBCU, Howard University, founded during the Reconstruction Era, has itself become a hub for this kind of excellence. Elbert Frank Cox, the first person of African descent to earn a PhD in mathematics, taught there for decades, training students who would carry mathematics forward in turn. Some of the best-known Black mathematicians are the ladies lionized in the blockbuster movie "Hidden Figures," who were "human computers" at NACA/NASA's segregated West Area Computing unit. Johnson calculatedtrajectories for Alan Shepard, John Glenn, and the Apollo missions; Vaughanbecame NACA's first Black supervisor; Jackson became NASA's first Black womanengineer. They received the Congressional Gold Medal in 2024; Johnson receivedthe Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015. Scholars like John Urschel, a former NFL offensive linemanwho retired from football to become a mathematician and professor at MIT specializing in matrix analysis and graphtheory continue to advance math thinking.
This lineage is why a growing number of writers and institutions now explicitlylink Juneteenth to mathematics and science. The Education Trust has publishedessays under the banner "Juneteenth Was Freedom, Education Is Power." A 2023 piece in the journal Cell, written by dozens of Black scientists, framesthe holiday as a beacon for the sciences. And scholar Erica Walker's book Beyond Banneker: Black Mathematicians and the Paths to Excellence documentsthis very history in depth.
Juneteenth asks us to remember a hard-won freedom and that, as the Universityof Illinois Chicago researcher Danny Martin has shown, Black learners arebrilliant. The lives of Johnson, Blackwell, Cox, and others ask us to rememberwhat that freedom, fully exercised, can build.
The Black Student Fund sits about a mile from this anchor of Black mathematicalachievement at Howard University, and is inspired to continue doing its part tochampion math literacy through the Conchita Poole Math Circle and deploymentof Tantalus, a math/arcade game app for children ingrades one through five. They are especially proud of the Math Circle's summermath program that will begin near the nation's holiday and is available to allarea children who are prepared to double down on the hard work of developingtheir math literacy. More can be learned about these efforts later this year atthe Black Student Fund & Latino Student Fund Annual School Fair or by goingto the Black Student Fund's website.