This year, everyone should be celebrating Juneteenth. The holiday — named for and celebrated on June 19 — commemorates the true ending of slavery in the United States. (You’ll note, it is not Jan. 1, the date of President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. More on this below.) From its celebratory roots in churches across Texas, Juneteenth remains short of a national holiday — for now — but is recognized nationwide in most states.
This year’s Juneteenth will get high-profile recognitions via Alicia Keys and John Legend’s “battle of the pianos” for Verzuz’s Instagram Live and the “Black History Month Spectacular” on AMC’s Sherman’s Showcase. But more than a century after the final slaves were freed, too many still don’t know why celebrating June 19 is important — and why America still has much to grapple with its legacy.
Why June 19?
Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation went into effect Jan. 1, 1863, declaring “all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State… shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.” It wouldn’t be until two and a half years later, on June 19, 1865, that General Gordon Granger and his Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas, with news that the Civil War had ended and any enslaved people were freed by executive order.
“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,” Granger’s proclamation read. “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 This Year
Juneteenth has garnered increased attention this year for a number of reasons, the first being that President Donald Trump not only scheduled his first campaign rally in months for June 19, but it was to take place in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the site of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre — one of the single worst acts of racial violence in history. (Trump would eventually reschedule his rally for the next day.)
Yet it’s hard to imagine the holiday wouldn’t have had added significance this year, amid global protests against systemic racism and police brutality following the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor — as well as the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Rayshard Brooks, Dominique “Rem’mie” Fells and too many more — and increased calls for allies (specifically white allies) to better educate themselves. (Ava DuVernay’s 13th, for instance, connects the dots from the abolishment of slavery to the prison industrial complex and our modern epidemic of mass incarceration.)
