The latest episode of Mathematica’s On the Evidence podcast coincides with June 19, which is celebrated by many around the United States as Juneteenth, a federal holiday commemorating the end of slavery in this country. Recently, one way staff at Mathematica have honored this important moment in U.S. history is by joining together in person and virtually on June 18th to read aloud and discuss a speech by Frederick Douglass titled “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”

Douglass gave the speech in front of a predominately white abolitionist audience about 11 years before President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring more than three million enslaved people living in the Confederate states to be free. The speech focuses on the contradiction of celebrating liberty at a time when millions remained in slavery. It both celebrates the ideals of the country’s founding and laments how the country has fallen short of those ideals.

This episode of On the Evidence features an interview with Sheldon Bond, the deputy director of Mathematica’s labor and employment area, who also acts as a co-lead for the company’s Black Employee Resource Group. Mathematica’s Black and Disability employee resource groups work with the Princeton Public Library to organize the readings of Frederick Douglass’s speech.

The episode also features clips from last year’s Juneteenth event, with passages read by Mathematica’s Rachel Miller, Sarah Lieff, Gloria Jackson, Stacie Feldman, Rachael Jackson, A’lantra Wright, Kirsten Miller, Boyd Gilman, and Dawnavan Davis.

A full transcript from the episode is available here: mathematica.org/blogs/on-juneteenth-reflecting-on-our-collective-equity-journey

Read Sheldon Bond’s My Mathematica blog about how, as a natural introvert, he has learned to communicate, connect, and build relationships in the context of a growing company with an increasingly hybrid work culture: https://www.mathematica.org/blogs/my-mathematica-sheldon-bond