For Miami Gardens resident Yvonne Hart, “freedom is an expression of God.”
For historian Dr. Marvin Dunn, it means protecting freedom of speech and ensuring Black history is not erased.
Keith Ivory defines it as “no corruption from our leaders and keeping transparency on the table,” while Nesha Crawford views it as “being able to decide what I want to do with my own body.”
More than 160 years after the end of slavery in the United States, freedom remains deeply personal, shaped by history, community and opportunity.
Ahead of Juneteenth, The Miami Times asked Black Miamians: What does freedom look like to you?
Freedom through history
For many elder Black Miamians, freedom is measured against a past when basic rights were denied.
Dunn, an 85-year-old historian, author and civil rights advocate, knows that history firsthand. He remembers sitting at the back of the bus during the Jim Crow era.
“I remember my mother getting on the bus with my brothers and me during that era, and she would hold our hands as we would walk past the white people to get to the back of the bus, and once we took our seats, she would relax,” Dunn said. “It felt like ‘I'm not good enough to sit with them.’ Jim Crow gave me and a lot of other people the sense that we were not good enough, and that's hurtful.”
When the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Educationdecision ended legalized school segregation in 1954, Dunn was 14.
“It was a change in aspiration, a sense of hope that the court is going to be fair to us. I think that's all gone now. There's no sense the court would do anything to protect our rights anymore,” Dunn said.
Thema Campbell, president and CEO of Girl Power Rocks, carries similar memories of integration in Georgia, which brought unexpected losses.
“We came back that Monday morning, and all of our best teachers were gone. They had taken the best teachers from the Black school and sent them to the white school,” Campbell said. “Everybody was crying. But Black people, and especially Black women, are resilient. We had to take the lemons that we were dealt and make lemonade.”
Hart traces her understanding of freedom to family trips through the segregated South.
“The one and only time I ever saw my daddy cry was when they told us we'd have to go to the bushes if we wanted to go to the bathroom,” Hart said. “We got back in the car and he said, 'It's not gonna be like this always. They don't know who you are.'”
For Crooks, a Catalyst Miami Community Engagement Manager for Overtown, freedom is rooted in ancestral pride. Her grandfather in Georgia chose to walk away from a business that refused to address her grandmother respectfully as "Mrs. Smith."
“My papa said, ‘There's no more business we have here.’ He closed their account and never went back. That's freedom to me,” Crooks said. “Literally, we are the embodiment of our ancestors' dreams. All the sacrifices, the mistreatment, the joys and the pains.”
READ MORE: How South Florida is using the arts to redefine Juneteenth ahead of America’s 250th anniversary
Threats to freedom today
As a historian, Dunn sees freedom as an evolving concept across generations.
"Initially, freedom meant freedom from enslavement," Dunn said. "In the Civil Rights Era, it meant desegregation, the end of Jim Crow, particularly in terms of education and increased opportunity to equality. Today, it means maintaining our history — not having our story erased, minimized or marginalized."
He added:
"Freedom in 2026 looks like having my vote count and not be gerrymandered out of existence," he said. "It's a very dangerous time, and the state of Florida is leading the charge to minimize, dismiss and take away our rights.”
Dunn pointed to growing threats to public education.
"It was public education that rescued us from slavery," Dunn said. "It was public education that opened doors for us."
Campbell agreed, noting that political shifts have made freedom “a scary thing.”
"We are walking this tightrope around an administration that looks as if it can take away freedoms from certain people at any time. They can write a new law, take it all the way up to the Supreme Court, get it passed, and your freedom can be snatched away just like that."
Recent rollbacks to the Voting Rights Act have local consequences, a reality that keeps community members like Keith Ivory on high alert.
"Freedom requires constant vigilance," Ivory said. "It's not like you arrive at a place and there's no more work to be done. You have to secure it because there's always some force trying to take it away.”
Freedom through opportunity
While older generations often define freedom through the barriers they’ve overcome, younger Black Miamians describe it as the opportunities they hope to achieve.
For 18-year-old Power U member Nyomi Dixon, freedom starts with autonomy.
“Freedom means having the income to be able to do and practice what I want,” Dixon said. “There is an ultimate goal that I want, which would be to own a house, though that's been made because of just the changing tides of the economy, but like a smaller goal is just to have at least like 50,000 saved in my bank.”
"And freedom of identity means to be able to exist fully as who I am without anyone being able to discriminate against that systematically or socially,” Dixon added.
Fellow Power U member Christopher Laidler Jarves, 21, views freedom as the power to speak openly and secure a meaningful career. He is currently pursuing a security license.
"When I was going to school, I would see security guards not really do their job," Laidler Jarves said. "I want people to feel safe."
For 21-year-old Angela Rahming, freedom begins with internal knowledge:
“The ability to realize that what's in front of you is not stopping you if you understand that the object in front of you is just an object and not a cage.”
For Crooks, economic justice is inseparable from true freedom.
“Being able to live in a space that is worthy of us and that we can afford, being able to feed our children, to go to the doctor and afford to be healthy — to me, that's liberation,” she said.
Campbell sees similar economic and personal challenges facing the girls she serves through Girl Power Rocks, yet she continues to emphasize resilience.
"The Black girls that we encounter here, they come through trauma. They come through abuse and neglect, but they always rise to the occasion,” she said. “We give them an opportunity to grow and to thrive. No matter what life throws at you, you still have a responsibility.”
Freedom through culture and community
For many, freedom is anchored in family traditions, community gatherings and cultural spaces that preserve Black heritage.
“Freedom is a work in progress,” said Terrance Cribbs-Lorrant, executive director of the Historic Black Police Precinct Courthouse and Museum. “When I hear freedom, I think about accountability and the responsibility to protect it.”
Long before Juneteenth became a federal holiday, it was a staple of Cribbs-Lorrant’s family reunions at local parks, where relatives gathered to honor their ancestors.
Crooks finds similar meaning in community traditions, tracing her earliest memories to sitting on the porch with the women in her family.
“That was the space where everything took place," Crooks said. "Problems would be worked through. The wisdom was incorporated there.”
Today, she finds that same spirit in restorative circles held inside Overtown's historic venues.
“We come together in a circle, and there's no hierarchy," Crooks said. "We are able to process through and love on one another. That's freedom to me — gathering, slowing down and listening to people non-transactionally.”
For Anitrice "Mama Joy" Jackson, that communal power is actualized through self-advocacy.
“Freedom means being able to speak what is on your heart in a respectful, powerful way to make a difference," Jackson said. "Walking into rooms knowing you belong there and not letting anyone make you feel otherwise. You stand firm. Ten toes down, boots on the ground."
Cribbs-Lorrant believes preserving history through art and museum programming keeps the struggle alive.
“The appreciation that I have for history is the ability to connect the why,” Cribbs-Lorrant said. “Why do I have the freedom that I have? It didn’t just come. It came with some action, some protests, some reaction. It came with somebody writing, standing up and speaking out.”
He sees art as part of that legacy.
"History without a canvas can really become lost," he said. “Artists are often a time capsule for what's happening in the world at that moment.”
More than 160 years after Juneteenth, Cribbs-Lorrant believes the struggle for freedom continues.
“What we are fighting to protect is literally the same things that were not in place in 1865,” he said. “We should never think that we have arrived.”
