06/19/2026
This week's Friday Series theme is "Juneteenth." I have included my photographs of a few Bucks County, PA locations, two Civil War battlefields (Antietam and Gettysburg), and some relevant national monuments (in Washington, DC). The fourth photo in this series is the Mt. Gilead AME church (in Buckingham, Bucks County) and the sixth photo is the Buckingham Friends Meeting House. Why did I include these?
Here's why. Pennsylvania was among the first states in the nation to begin abolishing slavery, and communities like Buckingham in Bucks County became refuges — places where Quakers and neighbors sheltered free Black residents and escaped slaves. Benjamin "Big Ben" Jones (said to be almost seven feet tall), was an escaped slave from York, Maryland. The federal Fugitive Slave Act shattered Jones' safety. Bounty hunters crossed into Pennsylvania, seized Big Ben, and returned him to Maryland to be sold. His neighbors in Buckingham refused to accept that outcome. They pooled their resources to purchase his freedom for $700 — the equivalent of over $19,000 today — a testament to the notion that ordinary people, in any era, always have a choice about whether to treat others with dignity or to diminish them, to act with courage and solidarity or to retreat into silence. Today, we face the same fundamental choices: empathy or scapegoating, inclusion or exclusion, the courage to face history honestly or the temptation to whitewash it into something more comfortable. It is worth recognizing what that whitewashing looks like right now: Supreme Court rulings that have hollowed out the Voting Rights Act, racially charged attacks on DEI programs, the removal of slavery exhibits from historic sites, and a federal government that no longer sees fit to open national parks on Juneteenth or Martin Luther King Day (while having free admission on our current president's birthday). Big Ben's neighbors chose dignity over indifference in the 1840s; these photos are an invitation to consider what that choice looks like for us in 2026, as we anticipate America's 250th birthday.
