DETROIT (WLNS) — The United States is currently celebrating its 250th birthday, a commemoration of the Declaration of Independence and its promise that all men are created equal. Weeks before the Fourth of July is Juneteenth, a federal holiday only since 2021, marking the day in 1865 when the last enslaved people in Texas finally learned they were free — more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation.
Few people are better positioned to hold both anniversaries at once than the Rev. Horace Sheffield III. Born in Detroit in 1954, he is the executive director of the Detroit Association of Black Organizations and pastor of New Destiny Christian Fellowship. He’s also a living link to the mid-century movement.
Sheffield’s father, Horace Sheffield Jr., was a United Auto Workers organizer in the civil rights era. Sheffield was a boy in his father’s basement when the leaders of that movement passed through, and he was 11 when he heard the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. speak in Detroit. He decided then that he wanted to be a Black leader…