In June 2020, in response to the protest movement against police brutality and the efforts to federally recognize the significance of Juneteenth, the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences at Virginia Tech established the Juneteenth Scholars Program. This program supports the college's faculty to conduct research aligned with the themes of the Juneteenth holiday: emancipatory movements, processes of collective liberation and the courage of freedom leaders, and local, national, and global resistances to ongoing systems of oppression. 

Each faculty scholar is paired with an undergraduate research assistant who works on tasks such as collecting and organizing materials, conducting interviews, and analyzing results. Through this partnership, students learn how scholars develop research projects centered on questions of history, ethics, power, and justice and help shape the project’s research questions and goals. 

In this video, you will learn about four of the sixteen research projects conducted by the Juneteenth Scholars.