Norton to Offer Remarks at Juneteenth Book Festival Symposium, Today
WASHINGTON, D.C.—Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) will offer remarks at the first annual Juneteenth Book Festival Symposium on Black Literature and Literacy, today, June 19, 2015, at 2:00 p.m. in the Reading Room of the African and Middle Eastern Division (LJ 220) in the Library of Congress' Thomas Jefferson Building (10 First St. SE). The Juneteenth Book Festival is a two-day, literacy-based event highlighting and celebrating literature and its critical role in the pursuit of survival, freedom, and expansion of African American men, women, and children.
"I particularly appreciate this 1st annual Juneteenth Festival and its dedication to literacy and literature," Norton said. "It is just the right theme for this festival at the nation's Library of Congress in remembering that the freed slaves yearned to read and write and saw literacy as central to their emancipation, as it is today for our children. In the District of Columbia, we celebrate Emancipation Day on April 16 because slaves in the District were freed nine months before the Emancipation Proclamation. As the first to be liberated, we believe that the freed slaves of the District of Columbia would have wanted us also to remember the last to experience freedom."