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It’s Friday.

Weather: Patchy fog in the morning followed by heavy rain. Temperatures will be in the low 80s. Expect periods of rain over the weekend.

Alternate-side parking: Suspended through Sunday.

The energy that has produced large demonstrations supporting Black Lives Matter in New York and other cities will most likely be heightened this Juneteenth, the annual holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States

Some people, however, may still be unaware of why the day is significant. Slavery in the United States was, technically, abolished in 1863, but it wasn’t until June 19, 1865, that enslaved Americans in Texas were told by a Union general that they were, in fact, free.

[So you want to learn about Juneteenth?]

This year, the date may resonate in new ways. On Wednesday, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo declared it a holiday for state employees. Several businesses have also announced that June 19 will be a paid holiday for their workers.

But the recent rush to embrace the holiday is also raising questions about what is motivating the change, and what it will accomplish.

“It’s been very clear from the uprisings that so many white Americans want equality quickly so that the unrest can go away,” said Dr. Christina Greer, an associate professor of political science at Fordham University.

“Because so many corporations have jumped on board, and so quickly, I’m feeling that it is more about their bottom line than a real deeper understanding of the systemic inequities that have existed for 401 years.”

At 6 p.m., Dr. Greer will join celebrities, activists and others for a Juneteenth Live! event on The Grio’s Facebook page.

Other virtual events marking the holiday include:

• At 2 p.m., the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture will host “Juneteenth: Creating Legacy in Contested Places.” The program will include a conversation with the chef and historian Therese Nelson; Dr. Andrea Roberts, the founder of the Texas Freedom Colonies Project; and two descendants of Texas’s Freedom Colonies. Also, Rootstock Republic will premiere a new arrangement of “Strange Fruit,” and the chef and author Carla Hall will celebrate Juneteenth through food.

• Ethel’s Club, a social and wellness club for people of color, is hosting an all-day event series for nonmembers. Starting at 6 p.m., attendees can watch a poetry performance, participate in a guided meditation and listen to a presentation by Tricia Hersey, founder of the Nap Ministry.

• At 7 p.m., HealHaus, a wellness studio and cafe in Brooklyn, will hold a donation-based “Liberation and Celebration” meditation.

• As part of the “Freedom: A Juneteenth Experience” event, the founders of BLK MKT Vintage, an antique and vintage shop in Brooklyn, and the mixed-media artist Adrian Octavius Walker will discuss black preservation and business on Saturday at 6:10 p.m.

From The Times

New York City Will Enter Next Phase of Reopening on Monday, Mayor Says

Council Forces N.Y.P.D. to Disclose Use of Drones and Other Spy Tech

Will the Pandemic Slow New York’s Progressive Momentum?

Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center Cancel Fall Performances

The Pandemic Sent Young New Yorkers Packing. Will They Return?

Want more news? Check out our full coverage.

The Mini Crossword: Here is today’s puzzle.

What we’re reading

An inmate briefly escaped from Rikers Island by trying to swim across the channel that separates it from Queens. [Daily News]

Some people in Queens want waterfront access in College Point. [Queens Chronicle]

What we’re watching: The Times reporter Nikita Stewart talks about her new book, “Troop 6000,” about a Girl Scout troop started in a city homeless shelter, on “The New York Times Close Up With Sam Roberts.” The show airs on Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 1:30 p.m. and Sunday at 12:30 p.m. [CUNY TV]

And finally: An escape artist better at art than at escaping

The Times’s Sam Roberts reports:

It was the best escape Ronald Tackmann ever made, though that really isn’t saying much.

At the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse on Sept. 30, 2009, Mr. Tackmann, a neophyte artist and professional prisoner, put on a light-gray three-piece suit and covered his orange inmates’ slippers with black socks to try to pass as his own lawyer.

Briefly uncuffed and unchained and momentarily out of the view of guards, he fled down a back staircase, sauntered outside and vanished into the streets.

[Ronald Tackmann, an escape artist better at art than escaping, dies at 66.]

Twice before he had tried to hijack Correction Department vans using fake guns he had fashioned out of bars of soap and remnants of eyeglasses and aluminum cans.

Mr. Tackmann stole to support a cocaine habit, sometimes brandishing a toy pistol or a cigarette lighter shaped like a weapon.

His escape attempts made him an obvious security risk, and he was confined in solitary for about 20 years. There, improvising where he had to, art became his life.

He substituted food coloring for paint, used his own hair to create brushes, and molded papier-mâché out of white bread and toilet paper.

He was born in Manhattan in 1953 and raised by family members in Queens. In January, afflicted with liver cancer, he was granted a medical parole from the Mohawk Correctional Facility in Rome, N.Y. He died at 66 on Saturday, in a hospice in the Bronx.

Some of Mr. Tackmann’s paintings and sculptures sold for several hundred dollars each, but little of his original work remains available, except for a book he put together titled “Million Dollar Ideas.”

Metropolitan Diary: Stopped at the cemetery

Dear Diary:

The woman who nearly ran me over with her S.U.V. on Metropolitan Avenue last year was headed to the cemetery.

She must have been terrified to see a pair of legs sticking out from under her front fender, where I landed when my bike hit a pothole. The impact wrenched my saddle from its post.

I begged her to take me the rest of the way to Queens College, where I was to teach a class. I can only imagine what she thought of the sweating, grimy person in a helmet who was making this request. Nonetheless, we were soon on our way.

We stopped at Linden Hill Cemetery to visit her husband’s grave.

May his memory be a blessing, I said when she returned to the car.

Back on the road, she asked what subject I taught.

Literature, I said.

Her face lit up and she began to rattle off names: Pushkin! Dostoyevsky! Tolstoy! Babel and Akhmatova. And Gogol. Gogol!

It had been her husband’s idea to leave Russia, she said, and now that she was here alone, these were the writers who sustained her.

I told her how much I enjoyed some of them, although in English.

She beamed.

When she dropped me at the campus gate, she asked how I would get home. I told her that I’d manage, and headed off toward class.

— Eric Lehman

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