Reflection/Why I’m Grateful:

Yesterday, I had the privilege of speaking to the employees of Dentons law firm in honor of Juneteenth. I’m grateful they invited me—and even more grateful they made space on their calendars to do this a week early to accommodate mine.

As I prepared my comments, I found myself thinking about Frederick Douglass and his presidency of Freedman’s Bank in 1874. I remembered sitting on a plane back in 2019, reflecting deeply on what that legacy meant—and what it meant that I, too, was leading a bank as a Black man in America.

That historical thread hit me—not just for its symmetry, but for its weight. I asked out loud: What does it mean to carry that torch today, in a country where freedom, equity, and opportunity are still not distributed equally?

I told them I wasn’t going to talk about Affirmative Action, or the lingering belief that opportunity equals unearned favor. I didn’t go into the disparities in education, especially for kids like me who grew up in foster care. I stayed away from the temptation to explore the policy distance that too often leads to disconnection—or the myth that inequality no longer has systems sustaining it.

Instead, I reminded them—and now you—that Juneteenth isn’t just a federal holiday or a long weekend.
It’s a mirror.

It asks each of us to take a long, honest look—at how far we’ve come… and how far we still need to go.

“Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow.”

– Isaiah 1:17