It's Juneteenth—a holiday that celebrates the end of legal slavery in the United States. Juneteenth gets its name because it marks June 19, 1865, the day a full two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation when enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, finally learned they were free.
The last two years have seen the broadest recognition of Juneteenth in at least 100 years. Two years ago, Juneteenth coincided with an unprecedented national protest demanding accountability for the police killings of Black Americans including George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Public pressure pushed major companies to give employees a paid holiday. And in June 2021, President Biden signed into law an act that made Juneteenth National Independence Day a federal holiday. (Fourteen Republicans voted against making Juneteenth a holiday.) Opal Lee, a 95-year-old teacher, is credited for leading the charge to get Juneteenth recognized as a federal holiday.
This national recognition of the evil of slavery comes during a significant backlash against teaching American history, as well as an erosion of other civil rights, namely a rollback of voting rights in places that have high populations of Black voters. In addition, it’s not entirely accurate to speak about “the end of slavery.” The 13th Amendment abolishes slavery “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” Legal slavery exists in America in prisons. And isn’t a single holiday a paltry form of reparations for nearly 250 years of legal human bondage, followed by hundreds more years of legal systemic racism?
National recognition of Juneteenth should make the history of American slavery—and the preciousness of freedom—undeniable. But antiracist activists warn that without a conscious effort to understand and teach the impact of slavery, we risk diluting the meaning of Juneteenth and making it like other federal holidays: just another big day for mattress sales.
What is Juneteenth?
Juneteenth—also known as Freedom Day, Emancipation Day, or Jubilee Day—honors the day in 1865 that enslaved African Americans in Galveston, Texas, finally learned that they were free, two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation, which, legally, liberated them.
“I think Juneteenth is an even more quintessentially American holiday than the Fourth of July,” Shennette Garrett-Scott, associate professor of history and African American studies at the University of Mississippi, in Oxford, explains. “It is about the sweetness of freedom, but also the bitter fight to possess it.”
What is the history of Juneteenth?
On January 1, 1863, Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation went into effect, freeing enslaved people in Confederate states.
But some enslaved people in the farther reaches of the region had no way of knowing about the proclamation. Some of them didn’t even know the Civil War was over. In Texas many slavers forcibly moved their enslaved people to hide them from the advancing Union army. “African Americans probably knew or had heard about the Emancipation Proclamation, but there really wasn’t anything they could do about it,” Garrett-Scott says. “They were surrounded; they dared not assert their freedom.”