The white oak in my backyard is living history. When calculating the age of a mature tree, the rule of thumb is to measure its circumference at chest level. By that metric, this oak has been standing for about a century and a half, dating to the end of Reconstruction. But instead of growing straight up, its trunk forks four times, creating a massive, multipronged crown. With trees, as with history, what is measured matters as much as how.

The oak took root in a Northern Virginia landscape recovering from the overplanting of tobacco and the scars of the Civil War, arriving just a decade after Juneteenth’s genesis. On June 19, 1865, on a sandy island outpost along the Texas Gulf Coast, enslaved people there were among the last to receive word of the Emancipation Proclamation signed two years earlier. The following year, they celebrated the date by establishing Jubilee Day, and after a name change, that local commemoration spread and became a federal holiday in 2021 — Juneteenth National Independence Day. This year, the nation’s second day for celebrating its freedom occurs a few weeks before the 250th anniversary of its first.

Today, Juneteenth signifies both the end of slavery and the rebirth of a nation. Emancipation gave the country a new start and the opportunity to........

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