Juneteenth has been a significant holiday for Black Americans for 150 years, marking the end of slavery in the United States. Also known as Emancipation Day, Juneteenth became a federal holiday in 2021.
While most Americans understand the history of Juneteenth, a University Of Massachusetts Amherst poll found that only 42% of Americans support it being a federal holiday.
Juneteenth is an important holiday for all Americans as it teaches lessons about the rule of law, equality, how the country came to define what it means to be a U.S. citizen, the stain of slavery on the nation’s history and the actions taken by leaders of the past to end it. It’s also a good time for companies to encourage employees to acknowledge the national holiday. According to research from Mercer, more employers are adding Juneteenth as a paid holiday. Juneteenth is just as crucial to the founding of the modern U.S. as the events celebrated on July Fourth.
Becoming a National Holiday
President Joe Biden named Juneteenth a national holiday on June 17, 2021. The day commemorates the 1865 announcement made in Galveston, TX, that slaves had been freed. The decision to officially mark the holiday has been a long time coming. Various congressional representatives and advocates have argued for the designation for decades.
In signing the proclamation, Biden called Juneteenth “a day of profound weight and power.” He said the day offers the chance for Americans to “remember the moral stain and terrible toll of slavery on our country” and the “ long legacy of systemic racism, inequality and inhumanity.”
“But it is a day that also reminds us of our incredible capacity to heal, hope and emerge from our darkest moments with purpose and resolve,” Biden said.
While Juneteenth is a federal holiday, state governments vary considerably on how to commemorate the holiday. In at least 28 states and the District of Columbia, government offices are closed and state workers have a paid day off, according to a Pew Research Center analysis.
The Origins of Juneteenth
While it centers on a specific event in Texas, Juneteenth – a word that combines June and “19th” – marks a day of celebration for the freedom given to slaves through the Emancipation Proclamation issued by President Abraham Lincoln on Jan. 1, 1863. Until then, the freedoms listed in the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights applied only to white men.
(Regarding voting, those freedoms applied only to property-owning white men. The first states did not allow non-property-owning white men to vote until 1828. North Carolina was the last state to allow it in 1856. And women did not get to vote until the 19th Amendment passed in 1920.)
More than two years after Lincoln issued the proclamation, a ship carrying Major General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, TX, on June 19, 1865. Granger announced that the war had ended (officially, it ended on April 9, 1865), and all enslaved people were now free.
While the Emancipation Proclamation legally freed the slaves, it changed nothing in the slave-holding states of the Confederacy. Even after the end of the war, Texas remained the last state with institutional slavery. But Granger and his men had come to enforce the law. Their actions resulted in freedom for an estimated 250,000 slaves in Texas.
The First Juneteenth Celebrations
Granger and the 2,000 Union troops that had come to Galveston marched through the city, reading the following proclamation.
“The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.”
Juneteenth celebrations began the very next year, with Black Americans celebrating the day much like the Fourth of July. Churches held many of the events, with celebrations including a prayer service, inspirational speeches, a reading of the Emancipation Proclamation, stories from former slaves, food, red soda water, games, rodeos and dances, according to the Texas State Library and Archives Commission.
In some cases, freed slaves purchased land to hold the celebrations. Those “emancipation grounds” include Emancipation Park in both Houston and Austin and what is now called Booker T. Washington Park in Mexia, TX. Celebrations soon spread to Louisiana, Arkansas and Oklahoma. Eventually, they reached every corner of the country as Black people migrated outside the South.
The Legal Importance of Juneteenth
Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation as an executive order, later upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. However, it only related to slaves in the Confederate states. The border states of Kentucky and Delaware did not free slaves until the passage of the 13th Amendment, adopted on Dec. 18, 1865. The amendment abolished slavery in the current states and any future state. It also ended involuntary servitude, the practice of forcing people to work to pay off their debts.
The proclamation also opened the door to the passage of the 14th Amendment on July 9, 1868. The amendment defines a U.S. citizen as anyone “born or naturalized” in the U.S. It nullified the 1857 decision from the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott v. Sanford case in which the court said those descended from African slaves could not be U.S. citizens.
The Emancipation Proclamation and the two amendments that followed marked the beginning of the modern U.S. and “began the long-term goal of achieving equality for all Americans,” according to National Geographic.
