The law went into effect immediately, making Friday the first federal Juneteenth holiday in American history.
By Annie Karni and Luke Broadwater
Published June 17, 2021
Updated June 18, 2021, 12:20 a.m. ET
WASHINGTON — President Biden signed legislation on Thursday to make Juneteenth a federal holiday, enshrining June 19 as the national day to commemorate the end of slavery in the United States.
“All Americans can feel the power of this day, and learn from our history,” Mr. Biden said at a ceremony at the White House, noting that it was the first national holiday established since Martin Luther King’s Birthday in 1983.
He said signing the law was one of the greatest honors he will have as president.
The law went into effect immediately, making Friday the first federal Juneteenth holiday. Public schools were closed on a moment’s notice. The federal Office of Personnel Management announced that most federal employees would observe the holiday on Friday, since June 19 falls on a Saturday this year. At the White House, officials canceled the daily press briefing and pulled down normal meetings for Friday.
The Nasdaq Stock Market said U.S. markets, however, were expected to remain open on Friday.
The Senate rushed the measure through with no debate this week after clearing away a longstanding Republican objection, and the House approved it on Wednesday by a vote of 415 to 14, with all of the opposition coming from the G.O.P.
“Throughout history, Juneteenth has been known by many names: Jubilee Day. Freedom Day. Liberation Day. Emancipation Day. And today, a national holiday,” Vice President Kamala Harris said, introducing Mr. Biden. She also signed the legislation in her capacity as the president of the Senate.
Juneteenth commemorates the end of slavery in the United States. Its name stems from June 19, 1865, when Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger in Galveston, Texas, issued General Order No. 3, which announced that in accordance with the Emancipation Proclamation, “all slaves are free.” Months later, the 13th Amendment was ratified, abolishing slavery in the final four border states that had not been subjected to President Abraham Lincoln’s order.
Momentum to establish Juneteenth as a federal holiday picked up steam last year during a summer defined by racial unrest and Black Lives Matter protests in response to the murder of George Floyd by the police. In a bid to woo Black voters during the final months of the 2020 campaign, President Donald J. Trump promised to support legislation to establish the new federal holiday if he was re-elected. Still, some right-wing activists criticized Republicans who supported the measure.
At the White House, Mr. Biden singled out Opal Lee, an activist who at the age of 89 decided to walk from her home in Fort Worth to Washington, D.C., in an effort to get Juneteenth named a national holiday. The president called her “a grandmother of the movement to make Juneteenth a federal holiday” and got down on one knee to greet her in the audience.
He reminisced about meeting her last year while campaigning in Nevada. “She told me she loved me, and I believed it,” he joked. Mr. Biden also framed the holiday as part of his administration’s efforts to address racial equity throughout the federal government.
“The promise of equality is not going to be fulfilled until we become real, it becomes real in our schools and on our Main Streets and in our neighborhoods,” the president said. He pressed Americans to celebrate the new holiday as a day “of action on many fronts,” most important, vaccines.
“We have more to do to close the racial gap in vaccination rates,” Mr. Biden said.
At an enrollment ceremony at the Capitol on Thursday morning, during which Speaker Nancy Pelosi signed the bill, Representative G.K. Butterfield, Democrat of North Carolina, led lawmakers in singing “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” which is often referred to as the Black national anthem.
Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, the No. 3 House Democrat, said he would push for the song to be designated America’s “national hymn.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/17/us/p ... biden.html
Biden Signs Law Making Juneteenth a Federal Holiday
Re: Biden Signs Law Making Juneteenth a Federal Holiday
What Walmart Doesn’t Get About Juneteenth
By Kaitlyn Greenidge
Ms. Greenidge, a contributing Opinion writer, is the author of the novel “Libertie” and the features director at Harper’s Bazaar.
It was with dismay that I realized, a few weekends ago, that Walmart is now selling Juneteenth T-shirts. I live in an extremely white Massachusetts county, one where it feels like a lifeline whenever I see another Black person I am not related to. I greeted the news of the T-shirts with an eye roll and a sour chuckle.
Though Juneteenth has recently gained nationwide attention, and just became a federal holiday, it originated as a Texas-specific celebration of the end of slavery. Other states and regions have their own traditions for marking Emancipation: Crucially, these celebrations have different dates from place to place, because freedom was gained through wildly different ways for Black people across this country. These are outlined in Mitch Kachun’s excellent book “Festivals of Freedom.”
In New York State, where gradual Emancipation was put into place to ease white fears at the expense of Black comfort, Emancipation Day was celebrated on the 5th of July. Celebrating on the 5th became a way to avoid the white mobs that often attacked Black people they saw daring to celebrate the Fourth of July. Indeed, in 1876, the year of the country’s centennial, many white newspapers ran articles decrying free Black people celebrating the country’s 100th anniversary of freedom — they dressed too finely and partied too elegantly, the newspapers said. It was above their station to do so.
Some Black communities in the North and South have also celebrated Emancipation Day on the 1st of January, because that was when Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation into law (with the caveat that it only applied to enslaved people in rebelling territories. Those in border states and territories in the Union, including Maryland, Missouri and West Virginia, among others, remained legally enslaved). Black churches usually hosted those dates, with watch nights on New Year’s Eve melding together with communitywide celebrations on Jan. 1.
To me, these myriad celebrations reflect what is so revolutionary about Black history. One of the powerful things about Blackness is that it undermines the idea of borders and complicates the dream of nationhood. These complications are part of why studying Black history is considered by many to be so dangerous. They are why we are in a nationwide moral panic about the possibility of children learning Critical Race Theory. The varied regional histories of Emancipation Day celebrations are a reminder that freedom in this country has never meant the same thing to everyone, has definitely never been experienced the same, and has always been conditional.
The first time I celebrated Emancipation Day was a July 5 in the late 2000s, maybe a year or so after Barack Obama was elected president. I stood on a makeshift stage in a community garden in Central Brooklyn and, along with a crowd of other Black Brooklynites, raised a small glass of cold water (many Emancipation Day celebrations shun alcohol because of the close ties between the abolition and temperance movements, and because Black communities were afraid historically to celebrate too boisterously in predominantly white areas like Brooklyn). We shouted, “to freedom!” The event was free. The only cost to show your appreciation of the idea of Black liberation was a suggested donation.
So, I look a little askance at Juneteenth T-shirts for sale in Walmart and the recent declaration of Juneteenth as a federal holiday. Juneteenth is not a part of any state’s history except Texas. But it is perhaps easier for some white Northerners to tut at the duplicity of white Texas slaveholders than to look at how Black people became free in their own states — like in Massachusetts, through having to sue for their freedom.
Among the most famous cases was that of Mum Bett, an enslaved woman whose owners would not let her rest, who said, “Any time while I was a slave, if one minute freedom had been offered to me, and I had been told I must die at the end of that minute, I would have taken it — just to stand one minute on God’s airth [earth] a free woman — I would.” She took the name Elizabeth Freeman after the court ruling.
Hilton Als wrote, “People are quick to make monuments of anything they live long enough to control.” I can’t help but think this is the impetus behind the rush to canonize Juneteenth as a national holiday. I worry the lessons of Juneteenth will become lost because we have seen the promising visions of Black freedom-dreaming co-opted before.
Think of Martin Luther King Jr., a man who spoke with such directness and nuance of America’s failings that he was hated by the majority of white people when he was alive, but who, in 2021, is treated as a saintly relic used by those in power to tell those who are suffering to stop naming the sources of their pain and say soft things, like Dr. King. Even as uncompromising a presence as Malcolm X has gotten this treatment, to the extent that, in the early ‘90s, Dan Quayle, George H. W. Bush’s vice president, claimed him as an inspiration.
In my most cynical moments, I think that the rush to embrace Juneteenth is about undermining Black people who are alive now of the right to protest. “Why are they still going on about voting rights and police violence and clean air and health care and schools,” a white politician can say to his non-Black constituents next year, “when we gave them a day off?”
And in the long run, I see something even more sinister. The myth of the American Empire, as a city upon a hill or a site of moral clarity or justice, is dying, and those in power know it. They know that the old stories America told itself about itself no longer ring true to most of us, if they ever rang true at all. So they mine those communities they’ve excluded, in search of that very rare mineral, authenticity.
But mostly, I am sad because when a holiday becomes co-opted like this, those who can gain a sense of self and solidarity from celebrating it often lose it. The agency that comes from deciding your own traditions — a cold water toast, a watch night — become lost to a corporate calendar and a megastore selling you a Juneteenth cookout checklist. You can lose sight of the possibility that exists in marginalized histories, which is the space to imagine another, better world.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/18/opin ... e=Homepage
By Kaitlyn Greenidge
Ms. Greenidge, a contributing Opinion writer, is the author of the novel “Libertie” and the features director at Harper’s Bazaar.
It was with dismay that I realized, a few weekends ago, that Walmart is now selling Juneteenth T-shirts. I live in an extremely white Massachusetts county, one where it feels like a lifeline whenever I see another Black person I am not related to. I greeted the news of the T-shirts with an eye roll and a sour chuckle.
Though Juneteenth has recently gained nationwide attention, and just became a federal holiday, it originated as a Texas-specific celebration of the end of slavery. Other states and regions have their own traditions for marking Emancipation: Crucially, these celebrations have different dates from place to place, because freedom was gained through wildly different ways for Black people across this country. These are outlined in Mitch Kachun’s excellent book “Festivals of Freedom.”
In New York State, where gradual Emancipation was put into place to ease white fears at the expense of Black comfort, Emancipation Day was celebrated on the 5th of July. Celebrating on the 5th became a way to avoid the white mobs that often attacked Black people they saw daring to celebrate the Fourth of July. Indeed, in 1876, the year of the country’s centennial, many white newspapers ran articles decrying free Black people celebrating the country’s 100th anniversary of freedom — they dressed too finely and partied too elegantly, the newspapers said. It was above their station to do so.
Some Black communities in the North and South have also celebrated Emancipation Day on the 1st of January, because that was when Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation into law (with the caveat that it only applied to enslaved people in rebelling territories. Those in border states and territories in the Union, including Maryland, Missouri and West Virginia, among others, remained legally enslaved). Black churches usually hosted those dates, with watch nights on New Year’s Eve melding together with communitywide celebrations on Jan. 1.
To me, these myriad celebrations reflect what is so revolutionary about Black history. One of the powerful things about Blackness is that it undermines the idea of borders and complicates the dream of nationhood. These complications are part of why studying Black history is considered by many to be so dangerous. They are why we are in a nationwide moral panic about the possibility of children learning Critical Race Theory. The varied regional histories of Emancipation Day celebrations are a reminder that freedom in this country has never meant the same thing to everyone, has definitely never been experienced the same, and has always been conditional.
The first time I celebrated Emancipation Day was a July 5 in the late 2000s, maybe a year or so after Barack Obama was elected president. I stood on a makeshift stage in a community garden in Central Brooklyn and, along with a crowd of other Black Brooklynites, raised a small glass of cold water (many Emancipation Day celebrations shun alcohol because of the close ties between the abolition and temperance movements, and because Black communities were afraid historically to celebrate too boisterously in predominantly white areas like Brooklyn). We shouted, “to freedom!” The event was free. The only cost to show your appreciation of the idea of Black liberation was a suggested donation.
So, I look a little askance at Juneteenth T-shirts for sale in Walmart and the recent declaration of Juneteenth as a federal holiday. Juneteenth is not a part of any state’s history except Texas. But it is perhaps easier for some white Northerners to tut at the duplicity of white Texas slaveholders than to look at how Black people became free in their own states — like in Massachusetts, through having to sue for their freedom.
Among the most famous cases was that of Mum Bett, an enslaved woman whose owners would not let her rest, who said, “Any time while I was a slave, if one minute freedom had been offered to me, and I had been told I must die at the end of that minute, I would have taken it — just to stand one minute on God’s airth [earth] a free woman — I would.” She took the name Elizabeth Freeman after the court ruling.
Hilton Als wrote, “People are quick to make monuments of anything they live long enough to control.” I can’t help but think this is the impetus behind the rush to canonize Juneteenth as a national holiday. I worry the lessons of Juneteenth will become lost because we have seen the promising visions of Black freedom-dreaming co-opted before.
Think of Martin Luther King Jr., a man who spoke with such directness and nuance of America’s failings that he was hated by the majority of white people when he was alive, but who, in 2021, is treated as a saintly relic used by those in power to tell those who are suffering to stop naming the sources of their pain and say soft things, like Dr. King. Even as uncompromising a presence as Malcolm X has gotten this treatment, to the extent that, in the early ‘90s, Dan Quayle, George H. W. Bush’s vice president, claimed him as an inspiration.
In my most cynical moments, I think that the rush to embrace Juneteenth is about undermining Black people who are alive now of the right to protest. “Why are they still going on about voting rights and police violence and clean air and health care and schools,” a white politician can say to his non-Black constituents next year, “when we gave them a day off?”
And in the long run, I see something even more sinister. The myth of the American Empire, as a city upon a hill or a site of moral clarity or justice, is dying, and those in power know it. They know that the old stories America told itself about itself no longer ring true to most of us, if they ever rang true at all. So they mine those communities they’ve excluded, in search of that very rare mineral, authenticity.
But mostly, I am sad because when a holiday becomes co-opted like this, those who can gain a sense of self and solidarity from celebrating it often lose it. The agency that comes from deciding your own traditions — a cold water toast, a watch night — become lost to a corporate calendar and a megastore selling you a Juneteenth cookout checklist. You can lose sight of the possibility that exists in marginalized histories, which is the space to imagine another, better world.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/18/opin ... e=Homepage
Re: Biden Signs Law Making Juneteenth a Federal Holiday
Juneteenth Reminds Us Just How Far We Have to Go
June 18, 2021
By Kate Masur
Ms. Masur, who teaches history and has written extensively about the Civil War and Reconstruction, the antislavery movement, emancipation, politics and the state, is the author of “Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, From the Revolution to Reconstruction.”
For two and a half centuries, starting long before the establishment of the United States, people of African descent fought against slavery every way they could. Americans legally bought and sold Black people as property, and enslaved status passed through generations, from mothers to their children.
It took a deadly civil war, at a cost of more than 650,000 lives, to rid the United States of that institution. To commemorate Juneteenth — now established as a national holiday on June 19 — is to recognize the importance of slavery in United States history, to remember the horrors of bondage and the jubilation of freedom.
Yet abolishing slavery was only one piece of a complex puzzle. It marked an ending, confirmed on Dec. 6, 1865, with ratification of the 13th Amendment. But it was also part of a much longer struggle to secure for Black Americans the rights and privileges promised to white Americans, a struggle that began long before Juneteenth and endures today.
For decades before the Civil War, Black Northerners and their white allies fought to rid their communities, and the nation, not only of slavery but of racist laws and institutions.
At the time of the American Revolution, slavery was legal throughout the British North American colonies. Though Northern states, starting with Vermont in 1777, gradually abolished slavery, many subjected free Black people to discriminatory regulations. Over time, the white Northerners who supported such measures insisted that newly freed people were poor and therefore likely to become criminals or public charges, or that Black people were racially inferior, or that the United States was destined to be a white nation — or some combination of all those ideas.
Those views were enshrined in laws in the Midwest, where newly admitted states, starting with Ohio in 1803, imposed special residency requirements on free Black people, barred their children from public schools, forbade them from testifying in court cases involving whites, and prohibited Black men from voting.
Black Americans mobilized against those laws. In Ohio and elsewhere, they were a minority of the statewide population and recognized that they needed white supporters if the discriminatory laws were to be repealed. They held meetings, organized petition drives and issued addresses to the white citizens of their states.
In the Northeast, Black sailors who had been unjustly incarcerated while their ships were in Southern ports told their stories to sympathetic whites, who in turn pushed the legislatures of Massachusetts and New York to provide funding for rescuing Black Northerners from Southern prisons. In the early 1840s, Black and white Americans petitioned Congress to secure for free Black sailors basic rights to pursue their livelihoods, to move freely and to the presumption of innocence.
Congress did not act. In fact, when Congress did pass legislation that involved the rights of free Black Americans, it was the oppressive Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which made free Black Northerners more vulnerable than ever to kidnapping and enslavement.
The Northern struggle made clear that abolishing slavery would not, on its own, lead to justice or even basic fairness for free Black Americans.
In October 1864, just before President Abraham Lincoln was elected to a second term, a large group of Black activists met in Syracuse, N.Y. Many had been writing, speaking and working for racial justice for decades. Most were from the free states, but a handful made the trip from slave states like Tennessee, Virginia and Florida.
In an “Address to the American People,” the convention insisted that the nation must not only abolish slavery but erase “from its statute-books all enactments discriminating in favor or against any class of its people” and establish “one law for the white and colored people alike.” The vote, the delegates insisted, was “the keystone in the arch of human liberty” without which “the whole may at any moment fall to the ground.”
The Syracuse meeting also had a practical vision. It founded a National Equal Rights League to demand “a recognition” of Black Americans’ rights as citizens of the United States. Northern and Southern delegates returned home to start their own branches. In fall 1865, George T. Downing of Rhode Island, who attended the Syracuse meeting, led an effort to send Black lobbyists to Washington to push for federal legislation that would affirm the principle of racial equality.
Republicans in Congress were ready. Some had been involved in prewar Northern struggles for racial equality. Others recognized that the nation was at a crossroads and that abolition would mean little without federal protections for Black Americans.
The Congress that met in 1865-66 adopted the nation’s first civil rights statute, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and the 14th Amendment. These measures passed despite full-throated Democratic opposition, including charges — so familiar today — that the new policies interfered with the prerogatives of the states and gave Black Americans unfair advantages over whites.
Juneteenth, then, should serve not only to remind us of the joy and relief that accompanied the end of slavery, but also of the unfinished work of confronting slavery’s legacy. Thanks to the efforts of generations of activists, laws that explicitly discriminate based on race are a thing of the past. But today’s conservatives echo their 19th-century predecessors when they justify federal inaction on voting rights with arguments about states’ rights and spurious claims of electoral corruption. These arguments join a growing attack on the teaching of American history itself.
Americans need to understand that the original Constitution, which protected slavery while providing few federal safeguards for individual rights, did not create a path toward abolition or racial equality. To the contrary, before and after Juneteenth, it was Black people and their white allies who fought to eradicate the racist legacies of slavery and who demanded that the federal government take action to protect the rights of all.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/18/opin ... e=Homepage
June 18, 2021
By Kate Masur
Ms. Masur, who teaches history and has written extensively about the Civil War and Reconstruction, the antislavery movement, emancipation, politics and the state, is the author of “Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, From the Revolution to Reconstruction.”
For two and a half centuries, starting long before the establishment of the United States, people of African descent fought against slavery every way they could. Americans legally bought and sold Black people as property, and enslaved status passed through generations, from mothers to their children.
It took a deadly civil war, at a cost of more than 650,000 lives, to rid the United States of that institution. To commemorate Juneteenth — now established as a national holiday on June 19 — is to recognize the importance of slavery in United States history, to remember the horrors of bondage and the jubilation of freedom.
Yet abolishing slavery was only one piece of a complex puzzle. It marked an ending, confirmed on Dec. 6, 1865, with ratification of the 13th Amendment. But it was also part of a much longer struggle to secure for Black Americans the rights and privileges promised to white Americans, a struggle that began long before Juneteenth and endures today.
For decades before the Civil War, Black Northerners and their white allies fought to rid their communities, and the nation, not only of slavery but of racist laws and institutions.
At the time of the American Revolution, slavery was legal throughout the British North American colonies. Though Northern states, starting with Vermont in 1777, gradually abolished slavery, many subjected free Black people to discriminatory regulations. Over time, the white Northerners who supported such measures insisted that newly freed people were poor and therefore likely to become criminals or public charges, or that Black people were racially inferior, or that the United States was destined to be a white nation — or some combination of all those ideas.
Those views were enshrined in laws in the Midwest, where newly admitted states, starting with Ohio in 1803, imposed special residency requirements on free Black people, barred their children from public schools, forbade them from testifying in court cases involving whites, and prohibited Black men from voting.
Black Americans mobilized against those laws. In Ohio and elsewhere, they were a minority of the statewide population and recognized that they needed white supporters if the discriminatory laws were to be repealed. They held meetings, organized petition drives and issued addresses to the white citizens of their states.
In the Northeast, Black sailors who had been unjustly incarcerated while their ships were in Southern ports told their stories to sympathetic whites, who in turn pushed the legislatures of Massachusetts and New York to provide funding for rescuing Black Northerners from Southern prisons. In the early 1840s, Black and white Americans petitioned Congress to secure for free Black sailors basic rights to pursue their livelihoods, to move freely and to the presumption of innocence.
Congress did not act. In fact, when Congress did pass legislation that involved the rights of free Black Americans, it was the oppressive Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which made free Black Northerners more vulnerable than ever to kidnapping and enslavement.
The Northern struggle made clear that abolishing slavery would not, on its own, lead to justice or even basic fairness for free Black Americans.
In October 1864, just before President Abraham Lincoln was elected to a second term, a large group of Black activists met in Syracuse, N.Y. Many had been writing, speaking and working for racial justice for decades. Most were from the free states, but a handful made the trip from slave states like Tennessee, Virginia and Florida.
In an “Address to the American People,” the convention insisted that the nation must not only abolish slavery but erase “from its statute-books all enactments discriminating in favor or against any class of its people” and establish “one law for the white and colored people alike.” The vote, the delegates insisted, was “the keystone in the arch of human liberty” without which “the whole may at any moment fall to the ground.”
The Syracuse meeting also had a practical vision. It founded a National Equal Rights League to demand “a recognition” of Black Americans’ rights as citizens of the United States. Northern and Southern delegates returned home to start their own branches. In fall 1865, George T. Downing of Rhode Island, who attended the Syracuse meeting, led an effort to send Black lobbyists to Washington to push for federal legislation that would affirm the principle of racial equality.
Republicans in Congress were ready. Some had been involved in prewar Northern struggles for racial equality. Others recognized that the nation was at a crossroads and that abolition would mean little without federal protections for Black Americans.
The Congress that met in 1865-66 adopted the nation’s first civil rights statute, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and the 14th Amendment. These measures passed despite full-throated Democratic opposition, including charges — so familiar today — that the new policies interfered with the prerogatives of the states and gave Black Americans unfair advantages over whites.
Juneteenth, then, should serve not only to remind us of the joy and relief that accompanied the end of slavery, but also of the unfinished work of confronting slavery’s legacy. Thanks to the efforts of generations of activists, laws that explicitly discriminate based on race are a thing of the past. But today’s conservatives echo their 19th-century predecessors when they justify federal inaction on voting rights with arguments about states’ rights and spurious claims of electoral corruption. These arguments join a growing attack on the teaching of American history itself.
Americans need to understand that the original Constitution, which protected slavery while providing few federal safeguards for individual rights, did not create a path toward abolition or racial equality. To the contrary, before and after Juneteenth, it was Black people and their white allies who fought to eradicate the racist legacies of slavery and who demanded that the federal government take action to protect the rights of all.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/18/opin ... e=Homepage
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