In October 2017, the season four premiere of Black-ish aired. The episode, titled “Juneteenth,” had a musical spin, which saw the Johnsons attend their twins’ school play that is centered around Columbus Day. However, Dre (Anthony Anderson) is taken aback by the inaccurate historical portrayal in the story and enlists Aloe Blacc to create a song to honor Juneteenth.
Black-ish creator Kenya Barris told THR the next year that former ABC exec Vicki Dummer had approached him with concerns about the episode making the “white audience uncomfortable.” Despite this, they went forward with “Juneteenth,” and it became a hit.
“I was like, ‘Vicki, you mean the episode about how talking about slavery makes white people uncomfortable makes white people uncomfortable?’ And we laughed at the fuckin’ irony of it,” he said. “We ultimately showed it and it was a well-received episode, but she was doing her job and that’s a network fight.”
The episode was so popular — and ahead of the curve — it was announced in 2018 that a stage musical based on the episode was in the works. Barris was set to write alongside Peter Saji while Pharrell Williams was attached to write, produce and compose the music, though the adaptation has yet to see the light of day.
In his 2018 story announcing the stage production, THR‘s David Rooney wrote of the episode, “The subversively funny, sharply double-edged episode became an instant classic, cleverly linking 21st-century African-American middle-class reality to the country’s brutal past of exploitation and suffering.”
Both he and Barris also noted that after the episode aired, Juneteenth showed up on Apple’s iCal, even before it became a federal holiday.
