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.”
On June 19, 1865, Union general Gordon Granger rode into Galveston and announced to the enslaved people that the war was over. “In accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States,” he told the waiting crowd, “all slaves are free.”
“I imagine right there under the balcony where General Granger made the announcement, people whooped and hollered and celebrated and went back and told their family and friends that they were free,” Garrett-Scott says. “The next year around that time many African Americans in their own communities marked their freedom on that day, and that celebration has continued continuously up until the present.”
Juneteenth was celebrated widely by communities in and around Texas in the 19th century, flagged in popularity in the 20th century, and has become a more broadly celebrated holiday in the United States as well as Africa and Europe since the 1970s. Awareness of the holiday outside the South has been raised by shows like Black-ish, Atlanta, and BlackAF, each of which have aired popular Juneteenth episodes. The 2020 Miss Juneteenth, a mother-daughter drama by filmmaker Channing Godfrey Peoples, was an indie success. Like that movie, the 2020 documentary (In)Visible Portraits by Loving producer Oge Egbuonu, started a trend of releasing works by Black creators on Juneteenth.
What does Juneteenth celebrate?
“I think that in many ways the vast majority of Americans are only beginning to reckon with the complexity and the horror of the history of slavery in the United States,” says Erica Ball, Black studies department chair at Occidental College in Los Angeles. “Most Americans have learned about the history of slavery from the movies. Until very recently, most mainstream Hollywood movies privileged a representation of slavery that makes it seem as if it was a gentle, kind, and benign institution. So commemorating it, kind of reckoning with it, is something that I think, in its horror, that Americans are only beginning to get used to thinking about.”
To truly commemorate the end of slavery, America would have to acknowledge that we had slavery in the first place. Twelve American presidents owned enslaved people. The White House, the Smithsonian, and Harvard Law School were built with slave labor. When slavery was finally abolished, the U.S. government compensated many slavers for the lost “property,” but enslaved people and their descendants never got reparations.
“I’ve seen how the constant reference to slavery as the main event of Black history during units in school, for example, can be extremely damaging to the mental and emotional placement of young Black people in America,” says Anya Dillard, a high school student in West Orange, New Jersey. “They grow up learning that the significance that their ancestors had was solely based on their suffering and humiliation, and that is not the case. There is so much more to the history that you and your ancestors have acquired over the years.”
How is Juneteenth celebrated?
Juneteenth isn’t a day of mourning or atoning for the institution of slavery (though we should have a day devoted to those things). It’s a liberation celebration. A day to raise the Juneteenth flag and remember. A day of music, parades, cookouts, education, parties, and memorials, an opportunity to support Black-owned businesses and exult in Black lives, Black history, and Black culture.
Mariah Williams, a 20-something living in Southern California, didn’t grow up celebrating Juneteenth, but her family acknowledged the holiday, and she never felt connected to Fourth of July. “My dad has always said, ‘Independence Day for whom exactly? Because you and me would have still been in chains in the 1700s,’” she says. “I definitely want to see more Black Americans embracing Juneteenth as our true Independence Day, and I want to see all American citizens accept Juneteenth as a part of this country’s history.”
“We can celebrate everything that we love about America without missing the opportunity to point out that it’s bittersweet,” says Garrett-Scott. “Juneteenth commemorates the waiting and the longing of those enslaved people in Texas, which resonates with today—there is a way to celebrate the greatness of this country and not neglect to highlight how far we still have to go.”
Since the ’70s, Garrett-Scott says, Juneteenth celebrations have spread outside the South to the rest of the U.S., and even internationally, through art and music festivals and parades: “They were never exclusively Black—they were always really inclusive, and wanted people from all ethnicities and races to come and celebrate this moment and also the wonderfulness of Black culture.”
Juneteenth isn’t the only historic day that has ever commemorated the end of slavery—there’s Watch Night and Emancipation Proclamation Day—but it’s one that has gained momentum. “Juneteenth really highlights the perspective of the folks who got the news, the folks who were the last to know,” Ball says.
On June 19 we’ll remember those people in Galveston, hearing the sound of Union horses arriving, waiting for true, complete freedom. Over 150 years have passed, and Black Americans are still waiting for the real freedom that comes from being safe from police brutality and systemic racism. “I’ve grown up in a generation that has seen America’s first Black president,” says Dillard. “But I’ve also grown up in a generation that has seen people who look like our brothers and our best friends get gunned down in the street.”
Her words evoke those of the novelist Ralph Ellison, who wrote, “There’ve been a heap of Juneteenths gone by and there’ll be a heap more before we’re free.”
