06/19/2026
Juneteenth commemorates the day in 1865 when enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, finally learned of their freedom more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. The holiday honors emancipation while reminding us that the promise of freedom has often been delayed and unevenly realized.
In "With All Deliberate Speed" (2015), Hank Willis Thomas reimagines a 1976 photograph of an anti-integration protest in Boston. What first appears to be an American flag is revealed, through the flash of a camera, as a record of racial violence.
Rather than adopting the title of the Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph by Stanley Forman, Thomas finds his title from the language of the 1955 Brown v. Board of Education decision. By foregrounding this legal language, Thomas shifts attention away from the spectacle of the image toward the quieter mechanisms of power that shape freedom over time.
The work points to how freedom and equality can be proclaimed in principle while deferred in practice. As we mark Juneteenth, the work invites reflection on the ongoing effort to bring the nation’s ideals into lived reality.
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Hank Willis Thomas, “With All Deliberate Speed”, 2015, Screen print on retroreflective vinyl, 33 x49 x 1 3/4 in., Courtesy the Artist.
