On Thursday, US president Joe Biden and vice president Kamala Harris approved Juneteenth, a new federal holiday commemorating the emancipation of enslaved Black Americans in the United States. After signing the federal holiday bill into law, Biden said, “Juneteenth marks both a long hard night of slavery subjugation and a promise of a brighter morning to come.”
According to Reuters, Juneteenth will be the eleventh federally recognised holiday in the United States, nearly four decades after the last one, which honoured American civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. The bill designating June 19 as the Juneteenth federal holiday was backed by both Democrats and Republicans in the US Congress, according to the agency. After passing the Senate unanimously, it received overwhelming support in the US House of Representatives on Wednesday.
Juneteenth on June 19: History and significance
Slavery has a long and painful history in the United States. In the 1600s, European colonists forcibly transported enslaved Africans to the British colonies that would later become the United States by ship; millions of people were legally owned there until the 13th Amendment was passed in 1865.
The Juneteenth federal holiday was chosen because it commemorates, in many ways, the freedom of enslaved Black Americans in one of the country’s most remote slave states following the American Civil War. On this day in 1865, Union Army general Gordon Granger informed a group of enslaved people in Texas that they had been freed two and a half years earlier by President Abraham Lincoln’s order.
During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1862 outlawed slavery in all states that had rebelled against the Union, including Texas. The proclamation’s implementation, on the other hand, was slow and frequently dependant on the advancement of Union troops. The slave states, where the presence of Union troops was low, received the news late, and Texas was one of the most of these states that had seen an expansion of slavery in the years prior. As a result, June 19, 1865, is remembered as the day when the light of emancipation shone brightest in the United States.
Reception in the United States on Juneteenth
“Great nations don’t ignore their most painful moments… they embrace them,” US president Joe Biden told a room filled with about 80 members of Congress, moments after signing the bill into law that recognised Juneteenth as a federal holiday. Other community leaders and activists, including 94-year-old Opal Lee, who campaigned for decades to make Juneteenth a federal holiday, were also present in the room.
US vice-president Kamala Harris acknowledged that the White House, the seat of power of the US government, is a “house built by enslaved people”. She said that the holiday would be an occasion to “reaffirm and rededicate ourselves to action.”
There were some Republicans in Congress who supported the Juneteenth bill, while others opposed it, claiming that declaring a separate holiday for Juneteenth would “needlessly confuse or divide Americans.”
