Tina Knowles partnered with Facebook to “honor the day” of Juneteenth and “highlight its importance with special programming and initiatives across Facebook platforms.”
She spoke about her new partnership and what the holiday meant to her in a recent interview on CBS This Morning.
Tina shared that she celebrated Juneteenth growing up and so did her daughters, Beyonce and Solange. “It was a day that you went to the beach; a lot of people don’t realize that Galveston (Texas) is an Island, and everything is centered around the beach.”
“When I got older, ” she continued, “I was able to go to Houston to Emancipation Park, and they have big beautiful parades there … we’ve always celebrated; it’s always been a very important holiday.”
It’s not until she moved to Los Angeles that Tina Knowles realized that the holiday wasn’t widely celebrated.
“I wanted to have a Juneteenth celebration,” she said, “and my friends were not aware that we found out two years later about the Emancipation Proclamation that Lincoln had signed.”
“There’s a lot of history that’s kind of been hidden,” she said, “and a big part of that is that there were by 1866, there were 19,000 black soldiers that fought for our freedom as well. And I think that’s important for us to know because we’ve been told differently. And it’s just one more thing of how the vital part that we played in the history of this country and helping to build this country has been changed. Everyone needs to know the truth.”
Tina Knowles gushed about the joy she had raising her children celebrating their Blackness.
I absolutely always knew that it was an honor to be a Black person,” said Knowles-Lawson. “This is what my parents taught me. We should have pride and just feel very honored by that. And so I was careful to impart that message to my children as well, to surround them with African American art and images that they didn’t obviously see on TV or around as much as they should have.”
“That’s up to us parents,” she maintained, “to impart that knowledge to our children and pass it on. My kids celebrate the 19th of June. They always have, and they always will.”
