Two Flags, One Horizon
One people tore a color out. Another kept every color in. Both were doing the same thing.
Pick up the Haitian flag and the Juneteenth flag and lay them side by side. At first they don't look like they belong in the same conversation. One is two clean bands of blue over red. The other is red and blue split by an arc, with a white star bursting at the center. Different colors. Different shapes. Born almost two hundred years and fifteen hundred miles apart.
But look at how each one was made — the actual hands, the actual decision — and you find two people answering the same question. What do free people put on a flag when the only flag they've ever stood under belonged to the people who enslaved them?
They answered in opposite ways. And that's exactly why they belong together.
The cut
May 18, 1803. The town of Arcahaie, north of Port-au-Prince. The revolution against France is grinding toward its end, and the men leading it gather to unify under one commander, Jean-Jacques Dessalines.
As Haitian tradition tells it, Dessalines takes a French tricolor — blue, white, red — and removes the white. He tears it out and throws it down. He hands what's left to his goddaughter, a seamstress named Catherine Flon, and she sews the blue and the red back together into one cloth.
The gesture is the whole story. White was the color of the colonizer, the planter, the master. Pulling it out wasn't decoration. It was a statement you could see from across a field: you are no longer in this. What remained — blue and red stitched into a single flag — was read as the union of Haiti's Black and mixed-race people, bound under one motto, Liberté ou la mort. Liberty or death.
(Historians are careful here, and so should we be: the torn-tricolor story is national tradition more than documented fact, and the details get smoothed over time. But the meaning Haitians have carried for two centuries is real, and it's the meaning that matters to this conversation.)
Eight months later, on January 1, 1804, Haiti declared independence — the first Black republic in the world, the only nation born from a successful uprising of the enslaved. The flag came first. The freedom it promised came right behind it.
Haiti's answer was subtraction. Freedom by separation. We are not yours, and our flag will not contain you.
The keep
Now jump forward to 1997. Boston. A community organizer named Ben Haith — people call him Boston Ben — decides Juneteenth needs a flag of its own. He works with collaborators on the concept, and an illustrator named Lisa Jeanne Graf later refines it into the version we fly today.
Haith makes a choice that looks, at first, like the opposite of Dessalines'. He reaches for red, white, and blue — the colors of the American flag — on purpose. His reasoning: enslaved people and their descendants are Americans. Their ancestors built the country. So the flag should carry the country's colors, and claim them.
Everything on it points to a beginning. The white star in the center stands for Texas — the Lone Star State, where on June 19, 1865, Union troops finally told the last enslaved people they were free, more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. But the star reaches past Texas to stand for freedom in all fifty states. Around it, a bursting outline borrowed from a nova — astronomy's word for a new star — for a new people, a new beginning. And the arc running across the flag is a new horizon: everything that was supposed to come next.
Juneteenth's answer was retention. Freedom by belonging. We were always part of this ground, and now we are free to stand on it.
What they're both reaching for
Here's what I keep coming back to, and it's the reason I made the video in the first place.
A flag is one of the oldest tools we have for claiming ground. Before a people have papers or borders, they have a piece of cloth that says this place, these colors, this is who we are here. That's a spatial act. It's about belonging to a piece of earth.
Haiti claimed its ground by tearing the colonizer's claim off of it. Juneteenth claimed its ground by insisting the soil our ancestors built was always partly ours. One removed a color to say this is no longer your land. One kept the colors to say this land is also ours. Opposite gestures — but both are a freed people planting a stake and naming the ground beneath their feet.
And both, when you look closely, reach for the same image. A star. A new beginning. A horizon. Haiti's revolution put a new star on the map of the world. Juneteenth's flag puts a bursting star over a new horizon. Two peoples, two centuries apart, both saying the same impossible thing out loud: we are new, and we are free, and we are not going back.
That's the through-line of this whole brand. The diaspora has never had one road to freedom. We've had a hundred. Some of us cut. Some of us kept. But we were all, every time, looking for the same thing — solid ground to stand on, and a flag worth raising over it.
Happy Juneteenth.