Today in History: Father's Day celebrated in US for the first time
Today is Thursday, June 19, the 170th day of 2025. There are 195 days left in the year. This is Juneteenth.
Today in history:
On June 19, 1910, the first-ever Father's Day in the United States was celebrated in Spokane, Washington. (President Richard Nixon would make Father's Day a federally recognized annual observation through a proclamation in 1972.)
Also on this date:
In 1865, Union troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, with news that the Civil War was over and that all remaining enslaved people in Texas were free — an event now celebrated nationwide as Juneteenth.
In 1953, Julius Rosenberg, 35, and his wife, Ethel, 37, convicted of conspiring to pass U.S. atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, were executed at Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, New York; they were the first American civilians to be executed for espionage.
In 1963, Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova completed her historic flight as the first woman in space, landing safely by parachute to conclude the Vostok 6 mission.
In 1964, the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 was approved by the U.S. Senate, 73-27, after surviving a lengthy filibuster.
In 1986, University of Maryland basketball star Len Bias, the first draft pick of the Boston Celtics two days earlier, suffered a fatal cocaine-induced seizure.
In 1975, former Chicago organized crime boss Sam Giancana was shot to death in the basement of his home in Oak Park, Illinois; the killing has never been solved.
In 1987, the U.S. Supreme Court, in the case Edwards v. Aguillard, struck down a Louisiana law requiring any public school teaching the theory of evolution to teach creation science as well.
Today's Birthdays: Hall of Fame auto racer Shirley Muldowney is 85. Nobel peace prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi is 80. Author Tobias Wolff is 80. Author Salman Rushdie is 78. Actor Phylicia Rashad is 77. Rock singer Ann Wilson (Heart) is 75. Actor Kathleen Turner is 71. Singer-choreographer-TV personality Paula Abdul is 63. TV host Lara Spencer is 56. Actor Jean Dujardin is 53. Actor Robin Tunney is 53. Basketball Hall of Famer Dirk Nowitzki is 47. Actor Zoe Saldaña is 47. Rapper Macklemore is 42. Actor Paul Dano is 41.
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Refinery29
34 minutes ago
- Refinery29
Brooklyn's Juneteenth Celebration Overflowed With Black Joy & Community
A rainy Sunday in Brooklyn's Fort Greene Park looked like a scene from an early 2000s Black film. Hundreds danced and sang along to Carl Thomas' 'Summer Rain' under delicate showers, seemingly without a care in the world. It felt like community, freedom and joy. This was a scene from The Lay Out 's 2025 Juneteenth celebration. Despite the gloomy weather, thousands of attendees gathered to enjoy the sixth annual event, which included Black-owned vendors, tennis clinics, double dutching, giveaways from Fenty Skin and the Brooklyn Nets. There was also a special appearance by the Liberty mascot and turn-up queen herself, Ellie the Elephant. 'I've been coming to The Lay Out since 2020 when there were like 40 or 50 of us,' said Tulani Foy, 37. 'It was during the pandemic, but it was a way for all of us to be among each other, and I think the spirit of that is still the same. It's raining, we're still out here, and I just appreciate that we're all in our most expressive way here. It's a powerful event to come back to.' Though Juneteenth became an official federal holiday in 2021, it was first celebrated in Galveston, Texas, in 1865—when the last enslaved Black people learned they were free. The news was delivered by Gen. Gordon Granger and his troops, who spread the word until all Black people knew about the Emancipation Proclamation, which President Abraham Lincoln had signed about two and a half years earlier. Today, Juneteenth, celebrated annually on June 19, has grown far beyond Texas, becoming a national symbol of freedom, reflection and celebration. The Lay Out founder, Emily Anadu, honors the holiday by throwing a free celebration for Black New Yorkers. The event has attracted thousands of attendees since it first began. But Anadu wants you to know: this isn't just a party in the park. Their mission is bigger than that. 'It's about creating an intergenerational space for Black joy,' Anadu said during a Zoom interview. 'We are about centering Black joy at the intersection of Black expression, our right to be, our right to do, to double dutch, braid hair. Like we can be proud about who we are and what we do and the cooperative economics of it.' Anadu officially founded The Lay Out in June 2020 amid the pandemic and the collective mourning and outrage over the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others. In the midst of protests, citywide curfews and rising anxieties, Anadu — who would often stay behind to clean up after protests — wanted to bring a sense of community back to her neighborhood. Along with co-founders Manushka Magloire, Cyrus Aaron, Briyonah Mcclain and Michael Oloyede, Anadu did just that. Attended by creatives, engineers, doctors, nurses, businesspeople, children, babies, and everybody in between, their Juneteenth event has become a homecoming and annual sanctuary—a place where people can reconnect and feel at ease. Whether folks choose to be by the DJ booth dancing, on the grass playing games or chilling along the perimeter of the park, just enjoying the day, it's become a space for Black people to just be. Acclaimed artist Derrick Adams told Anadu the event feels like his 'paintings in motion' because, like his work, The Lay Out reflects 'the Black body at rest and the Black body at joy.' Six years later, though the mission to cultivate Black joy is still the same, there's another urgent priority for Anadu: to sustain. 'Now my mission is about holding on to what it is, as much is about what happens in the moment,' Anadu said. 'I spend a lot of time now just trying to hold on and the delicate balance of welcoming new people in, but also letting people understand, like, we kind of got a thing going here.' A very real anxiety exists for Black New Yorkers right now as community staples disappeared left and right in recent years, including Bed-Vyne Brew, Lovers Rock and Ode to Babel. Gentrification and rising property costs have made it hard for businesses that center on Black communities to survive. Not to mention, beyond economics, increasing restrictions on public social gatherings, overbearing police presence at community events and social media virality culture have made it harder for free, Black-run events to gain traction in Brooklyn. Anadu felt those anxieties and pressures in the days leading up to Sunday. She notes that, contrary to what people may see with the brand collaborations and production, she doesn't make much off of the events. The former marketing director says it takes tens of thousands of dollars to pull off an event like this, and much of the budget goes towards cleanup. 'Coming out of the pandemic, when a lot of things died, to be here, celebrating this for the sixth time, it takes a lot,' she said. 'It takes honoring the community and making sure that The Lay Out is about our right to gather and to take up space. One woman described in one of our recap videos black people doing black things without judgment, without our bodies being policed, without any of that. And that hasn't happened by accident.' The Lay Out is a reminder that building community doesn't just happen. It takes care, consistency and intention. It takes people willing to listen, give back, and take care of each other, including the spaces we occupy. Because of the work organizers have put in, The Lay Out has been able to host programming that feeds those in need, brings visibility to Black-owned businesses, and makes Black presence visible in spaces where we're often left out. They've even sparked a few love stories and helped two couples get engaged. Anadu said she has no intention of stopping anytime soon. 'I want people to feel entitled to joy,' she declared.'It is our inalienable right to happiness with the pursuit of happiness, the pursuit of joy. And I truly believe that for us. I wouldn't put what I put into it — time, space, emotional, physical — if I didn't truly believe in our right to the pursuit of joy. I just want all of us to be supportive of that.'
Los Angeles Times
an hour ago
- Los Angeles Times
‘The Damned' brings the Civil War to intimate life, obliquely and mesmerizingly
How much can you strip away from the war film and still have a war film? That question invigorates 'The Damned,' the new movie from Roberto Minervini, an Italian-born director who has spent the last 25 years living in America, our worrying cultural undercurrents seeping into his portraits of the marginalized and the discontent, usually documentaries. 'The Damned' represents his first foray into more traditional narrative storytelling, yet this existential drama bears all the hallmarks of his earlier work, less concerned with incident than conjuring a sense of place, time and, most important, a state of being. In his latest, Minervini brings viewers into the thick of the Civil War, only to find the same dazed souls and gnawing uncertainties that have always been his focus. It's a war film with very little combat, but it's about a war that still rages today. Minervini's naturalistic, observational style is on display from the film's first scene, which lingers on a pack of wolves meticulously digging into an animal carcass. 'The Damned' stays on the images just long enough for them to grow discomforting — when will Minervini cut away? — before introducing us to his anonymous protagonists, a collection of volunteer soldiers in the U.S. Army who have been sent out west in the winter of 1862. The specifics of the mission are as mysterious as these men's names as we watch them carry out the minutiae of military busywork. They set up tents. They play cards. They do target practice. Are they meant to represent the hungry wolves from the movie's opening? Or are they the prey? To call 'The Damned' an antiwar film would be to assign an arbitrary value to what is really a series of offhand episodes consisting of only modest activity. In Minervini's recent stellar nonfiction projects 'The Other Side' and 'What You Gonna Do When the World's on Fire?,' the director collaborated with his subjects to create unvarnished glimpses of everyday lives, sometimes working from prearranged scenarios. Although Minervini is credited as 'The Damned's' screenwriter, his new film draws from a similarly close relationship with his cast, the actors drawing on aspects of their real lives to inform their roles, scenes developing from a loosely sketched-out plot. In such an intimate, pensive atmosphere, characters emerge gradually out of the rugged landscape like windswept trees or weathered stones. The man identified in the end credits as the Sergeant (Tim Carlson, one of the subjects of Minervini's 2013 documentary 'Stop the Pounding Heart') is ostensibly the leader, but as the untamed Montana wilderness goes from barren to snowy over an unspecified period of time, the more apparent it becomes that no commanding officer is necessary. The skeletal score by Carlos Alfonso Corral, who doubles as the film's cinematographer, hints at an elemental menace just over the horizon. But real danger rarely occurs. Instead, these men are trapped in their own heads, their tender, confessional musings about God, war and manhood so rudimentary that they never aspire to the heights of folksy poetry. These soldiers are nothing special — as unimportant as their assignment. Because Minervini avoids the tropes of the antiwar film — no big speeches, no ponderous metaphors — it's almost a shock that he allows for one convention, an actual battle scene, which occurs about halfway through the 88-minute runtime. But even here, 'The Damned' refuses to follow formula, resulting in an intentionally haphazard sequence as the soldiers are ambushed, the characters fleeing and shooting in every direction, the camera trailing behind them, desperate to keep them in frame. Whether it's enemy forces or some random buffalo, the movie's shallow depth of focus ensures that we only see our troops. Everything else resides in a permanently fuzzy, unsettled background, a constant middle distance that traps the characters in their spiritual purgatory. There are limitations to Minervini's spartan approach. Whereas his documentary films crackle thanks to his unpredictable interactions with his subjects, 'The Damned' cannot help but feel slightly overdetermined, the outcomes predestined rather than organically unearthed. And yet, the concerns he brought to those earlier movies ripple here as well. 'The Other Side,' his somber 2015 study of racist drug addicts and gun-toting militia members in rural Louisiana, remains the definitive warning of our modern MAGA age, while 2018's 'What You Gonna Do' prefigures the Black Lives Matter movement. Now, for the first time, this prescient filmmaker visits America's distant past, subtly pinpointing the economic inequalities, senseless brutality and thwarted masculinity that will bedevil the nation for the next 160 years. The Civil War is long over, but the country's divisions remain, those core tensions naggingly unresolved. Don't think of 'The Damned' as an antiwar film — consider it an origin story for Minervini's perceptive, understated exploration of an America still in conflict.
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Granderson: Where's the music that meets this moment? Black artists are stepping up
It's been one year since Kendrick Lamar took the Kia Forum stage in Inglewood for 'The Pop Out: Ken and Friends,' the first in a series of highly publicized victory laps that have come at the expense of his deflated rival, Drake. Their rap battle began more than a decade ago, and the two heavyweights exchanged subtle lyrical jabs until the gloves came off in the winter of 2023. By the following spring, they were exchanging a flurry of scathing diss tracks, each diving deeper into the other's personal life. The fight was competitive until K-Dot landed the haymaker. It wasn't the chart performance of 'Not Like Us' that declared Lamar the winner. No recording artist has more Billboard Hot 100 entries than Drake. In fact, he has more appearances on the chart than Michael Jackson, Elvis and the Beatles combined. When it comes to talent and commercial success, Drake is unquestionably among the greats. The reason Lamar was able to knock him out was because Drake's authenticity couldn't take a punch. That's not just my score card. That's what the culture was feeling. Lamar performed 'Not Like Us' five times during that Juneteenth show last year and dropped the accompanying music video on the Fourth of July. By the time Vice President Kamala Harris was playing it at her first rally as the presumptive Democratic nominee in Atlanta, every sporting event in America was playing that song. Yes, the 'A-minor' double entendre was catchy, and it is always good to have Mustard on the beat. But what elevates 'Us' is the same thing that grounds the artist who wrote it — an unapologetic defense of the culture and the people from which the art originates. As the saying goes: 'Everybody wants to sing our blues. Nobody wants to live our blues.' For Lamar, the decadelong rap battle stems from his lifelong disdain for gangster cosplay and the vacuous monetizing of Black culture. As the diss tracks between the two progressed, it was clear Drake was still trying to win a rap battle — while Lamar was inspiring a conversation beyond their beef, rap music and even the entertainment industry. At the heart of Lamar's surgical evisceration of Drake's brand of artistry is a question all creatives must ask of themselves at some point: What am I doing this for? * * * Few inflection moments in American history have shaped our society quite like the convergence of war, technological advancement, old-fashioned prejudice and artistic expression during the summer of 1969. From the Apollo moon landing and Woodstock to the Stonewall riots and the Harlem Cultural Festival, there wasn't a disciple or demographic that was not directly affected over that stretch. It was during the summer of 1969 when the great Nina Simone gave a concert on the campus of Morehouse College in Atlanta after the school's most famous alumnus — the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. — had been assassinated the year before. Simone joined other artists there to offer the students encouragement. That summer she also debuted the song 'To Be Young, Gifted and Black' and performed it during the Harlem Cultural Festival. Her contemporaries Donny Hathaway and Aretha Franklin soon recorded their own versions of the song — not because of its chart success, but because of its purpose. 'An artist's duty, as far as I'm concerned, is to reflect the times,' Simone said after her Morehouse performance. 'How can you be an artist and not reflect the times? That to me is the definition of an artist.' Indeed, after Bob Dylan asked 'how many years can some people exist before they're allowed to be free?' in his 1962 protest song, 'Blowin' in the Wind,' Sam Cooke was inspired to declare 'it's been a long time coming, but I know change is gonna come' in 1963. The 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham pushed Simone to write her first protest song in 1964: 'Mississippi Goddam.' By the summer of 1969, she was known as much for her work in the civil rights movement as for her music. Simone still wrote songs about love, heartache, those sorts of things. However, the reason her legacy still looms large today (the Irish singer Hozier named his third EP after her in 2018) is that Simone was also willing to use her art to reflect the times. Not sure if you've looked around the country recently, but the times we live in are a-changing. And just as was the case in the summer of 1969, the summer of 2025 finds the U.S. at a convergence of war (Ukraine-Russia/Israel-Gaza-Iran) and technological advancement (especially artificial intelligence) and old-fashioned prejudice (indiscriminate ICE raids). However, in this updated version of America, the White House has taken over the Kennedy Center, has cut off National Endowment for the Arts grants, has threatened the broadcast licenses of news networks and is holding a guillotine over Big Bird's head. Because of President Trump's unprecedented hostility toward long-standing cultural and academic institutions, there is a question of how far tech and media executives will allow today's artists to reflect the times we're living in. 'I think it's hard today to get a feel for the totality of what people are feeling because there's so much out there to consume,' documentarian and author Nelson George told me. 'The Chuck D who's 25, right now, I don't hear him. The Tracy Chapman of this era. Do we really not have voices that are saying something or are we not getting access to those people? All those songs from other moments in history, I'm surprised there hasn't been an anthem for this time yet.' Comedian Roy Wood Jr. said he feels that in his line of work, 'resistance humor or educating humor' works best in television because 'TV is a reflection of who we are, where I feel like movies are what we wish we could be or were.' The host of CNN's 'Have I Got News for You' also said because of the political climate we're in, instead of challenging us to learn or grow as a culture, TV executives are 'canceling a lot of the shows that really focused on serious societal issues because there's a pushback against those types of topics.' Big Sean, whose 2013 project with Lamar is pegged as the starting point of the Drake beef, said there was significance to Lamar's 'pop out' appearing on Juneteenth, the federal holiday marking the end of slavery in the U.S. 'I feel like being Black is awesome.… We worked as a people to get there, to feel like that,' he told me. 'That's why I'm so thankful for the people that said I'm Black and I'm proud.' And that James Brown vibe is the type of art Big Sean said he is currently working on, the kind that uplifts and gives listeners hope. Lamar's Juneteenth show was livestreamed on Prime and became Amazon Music's most-watched production. For Ben Watkins, creator of the Prime TV series 'Cross,' the success of Lamar's performance — along with his Super Bowl show and current tour with SZA — is proof there is a hunger for authentic Black artistic expression in this current political environment. As he was putting together the TV show, Watkins said, he told everyone involved: 'I'm going to do a Black man with swagger, I'm going to show D.C. to its fullest and I'm going to honestly talk about some of the controversies and contradictions of a Black cop.' The reaction? 'That sounds great to us.' 'Cross' premiered the week after the 2024 election and for 100 days it was among Prime Video's top 10 most-watched series. Grammy winner Ledisi said she wasn't planning on writing a political anthem when she began composing 'BLKWMN' for her latest album. However, her tribute to the resolve of Black women was embraced as an anthem after its release in February. 'I wasn't thinking of any of that, just creating,' she told me. 'When you're truly creating … you just have an intention of releasing whatever that feeling is. I'm glad it resonated with the times.' Even before the song took off, Ledisi unexpectedly found herself in the middle of social media attacks for daring to sing the National Black Anthem at this year's Super Bowl. That's why when she sang a couple of lines from one of Lamar's anthems during a recent tour stop in Chicago, I couldn't help but feel it was more a word of encouragement for herself and the predominantly Black audience than it was a nod to a commercially successful track. That week Trump announced plans to resurrect names from the Confederacy on public land. Just hours before Ledisi took the stage, 'No Kings' protesters came marching by, followed closely by local police. Their chants echoed loudly throughout the North Loop, their passion forcing those shopping and dining near the river to take notice. The concrete walls and thick glass designed to rebuke Chicago's winter could not keep out the cries of the people. Later that night Ledisi, whose Nina Simone tribute album was nominated for a Grammy in 2021, looked up in the balcony, smiled — and visibly exhaled. 'We gon' be all right,' she sang to a full Chicago Theatre house. 'We gon' be all right.' * * * Few inflection moments in American history have shaped our society quite like the convergence of war, technological advancement and old-fashioned prejudice during the summer of 1865. The second round of the Industrial Revolution was on the horizon, the Confederacy was on its last legs, and the first Juneteenth celebration was born. However, while the Civil War was all over, racism managed to emerge from the wreckage unscathed. In fact, a Confederate journalist by the name of Edward A. Pollard began working on a revisionist history book that painted the South as noble and slavery as unimportant to their way of life. Pollard's piece of fake news, 'The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates,' was completed before President Andrew Johnson had even declared the war officially over. And to this day there are elected officials from former Confederate states who repeat untruths about the war that originated from Pollard, an enslaver. Today there are state holidays in honor of men who fought against this country because for some white people it still feels better to believe Pollard's lies about the Confederacy than to accept the truth about America. Historically this is where creatives have come in, using artistic expression to fill in the gaps in our understanding of one another. Sometimes the art is profitable. A few times it hits No. 1 on the New York Times Bestseller list or Billboard chart. More often than not, it is underappreciated. However, art that reflects an authentic lived experience is always necessary. It is both the spark that can ignite a fire and the coolant that prevents us all from overheating. Over the last century, each time it seems the world was falling apart — be it war, famine or disease — it was always the artists who kept us laughing, hoping and believing. A year ago, on Juneteenth, Kendrick Lamar took the Forum stage for what was initially viewed as a victory celebration. And it was … though he didn't do it for himself. KDot did it for 'Us.' @LZGranderson If it's in the news right now, the L.A. Times' Opinion section covers it. Sign up for our weekly opinion newsletter. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
