In writer-director Channing Godfrey Peoples' debut feature, Miss Juneteenth, Nicole Beharie stars as Turquoise Jones, a single mom to teenager Kai (Alexis Chikaeze) living in a suburb of Fort Worth, Texas.
Balancing two jobs, Turquoise does her best to set high standards for her daughter, hoping Kai will stray from her own path and go off to college and seek a career.
What will set Kai on that path (or so Turquoise believes) is the local Miss Juneteenth pageant, an event that honors the historic day — June 19, 1865 — when enslaved people in Texas finally learned about the Emancipation Proclamation two years after the fact.
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