Poet Lynne Thompson closed the opening ceremony of the third annual June Jubilee celebration at the Los Angeles Central Library with a poem inspired by a quote from activist Fannie Lou Hamer: "Nobody's free until everybody's free," sending the crowd into the day's festivities with uplift and purpose.
As the city's fourth poet laureate, Lynne spent a year sharing poets and poems she admired through her podcast, Poems on Air. She continues to support poetry and the arts. Learn more at her website.
Lynne Thompson, the daughter of Caribbean immigrants, is the author of four poetry collections: Beg No Pardon (2007), winner of the Perugia Press Prize and the Great Lakes Colleges Association's New Writers Award; Start With A Small Guitar (2013), published by What Books Press; and Fretwork (2019), winner of the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize. Her latest collection is Blue in a Blue Palette (2024).
Her honors include the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Award for poetry, the Stephen Dunn Prize for Poetry, and fellowships from the City of Los Angeles, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Summer Literary Series in Kenya.
Thompson’s work has appeared in Ploughshares, Poetry, Poem-A-Day (Academy of American Poets), New England Review, Colorado Review, Pleiades, Ecotone, and Best American Poetry, among others.
"Nobody’s Free Until Everybody’s Free"—Fannie Lou Hamer
Because they were not told of the President’s
1861 Proclamation, the enslaved: the Africans—
the Mexicans—the native born—continued their
unpaid labors as carpenters, bricklayers, butchers,
blacksmiths, wheelwrights, tailors, boatmen, cooks,
waiters and housemaids for almost 1000 days after
freedom was "bestowed" on the Confederacy. And
their bondage would've continued well past rapture
if General Granger hadn't come to Galveston to tell
them except that he didn't really tell them. Instead,
his Order No. 3 was posted around town to be read
by folks legally prohibited from reading and as a result
they had to rely on their enslavers to tell them the news &
in telling them the news, the newly-freed were also
told they could not congregate, should return to their
"homes" and "work for wages"; that idleness wouldn't
be tolerated. A limited freedom is a dog who won't bark.
But if the people resented the fact their enslavement lasted
2-1/2 years longer than it should have or that, in the end,
it rang hollow, it didn't keep them from celebrating with
picnics or dancing the pigeon wing or giving hallelujahs in
their churches. In Mexico, Black Seminoles' descendants
who'd fled slavery still celebrate the holiday as El Día de
los Negros. And more than 100 years later, legislators in
Texas declared a State holiday to commemorate this
history—this Juneteenth— and many other states followed
suit. At the age of 89, Opal Lee, who some call the "Grand-
mother of Juneteenth", walked from her home in Fort Worth,
Texas, to Washington D.C. to seek federal recognition for
the holiday and in 2021, President Joseph R. Biden signed
the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act into law.
In celebration, he said, "Our history is not just about the past,
it's about our present and our future." In our present, a new
President has declared his opposition to "special observances"
and thus, federal agencies will "pause" holidays such as the
birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr., Holocaust Remembrance
Day, Juneteenth. But the people will never forget and a button
called "pause" doesn't exist in our minds. No matter what our
so-called leaders say, history—even at its most horrific—can't be
denied or erased. This is why Opal walked. 89 years old. She
wanted to make a point, to get the country to see and never forget.
We should all be Opals because we're free as long as we fight to be.
Lynne Thompson, Poet Laureate Emerita
Commissioned in July 2025 by Changing Tones for the Los Angeles Public Library and to inspire African Americans.