On June 19th each year, Americans do not commemorate an ordinary day, but rather a long-anticipated moment in the country's history.
In 2021, this date became the newest official holiday in the United States after former President Joe Biden signed a decision adopting it.
“Juneteenth” is a result of merging the word “June” with “tenth,” which signifies the nineteenth.
On this day in 1865, the Emancipation Proclamation reached Texas, the last state where slavery continued despite the proclamation being issued two years earlier.
This delay was due to the absence of transportation and communication means that prevented the news from reaching Texas.
Despite the passing of many years, this day is still not immune from political tug-of-war.
During his first term, American President Donald Trump spoke about the possibility of making it a federal holiday, but did not carry that out.
The decision later came during the administration of former President Joe Biden in 2021.
Upon his return to the presidency, Trump criticized the number of holidays and their impact on the economy. He did not cancel the day but excluded it from the list of free national park days, replacing it with June 14th, which is Flag Day and coincides with his birthday.
This decision sparked harsh criticism, with Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League, a civil organization focused on empowering members of the African American community, describing Trump’s exclusion of this day from the list of free park days as childish behavior and adding: “I think African Americans look at this and say: Here we are again, in front of Mr. Trump obsessed with self-aggrandizement. It is not just a repetition of what happened; we are being disrespected and dehumanized by our government, and that is very frustrating.”
“Juneteenth” became a point of contention between the two main parties in the country: Republicans and Democrats.
Some conservative factions, as noted by Hassan Kwame Jeffries, a history professor at Ohio State University, see the celebration as “overblown,” a view he strongly rejects.
He adds that “under this administration, conservatives and the right will cling to anything they can use to promote it as a celebration of non-white culture, which is absurd.”
He observes that the Democratic Party is different; the administration that made this day a federal holiday was a Democratic administration.
However, Lanitra Berger, director of African and African American studies at George Mason University, seems confident that this day will remain in place.
She states, “Even if the political climate changes, Juneteenth will not disappear ... people know what it means.”
She adds: “Some may try to downplay it ... but no one can stop us from celebrating our freedom.”
For many, this day is not just another day on the calendar but a symbol of the end of a long chapter of slavery and the beginning of a story yet to be completed.
The emancipation of slaves coincided with the end of the American Civil War, which began in 1861 and lasted until 1865 between the Union states in the north, led by President Abraham Lincoln, and the Confederate states in the south that still acknowledged slavery.
President Abraham Lincoln had announced on January 1, 1863, that all slaves in the rebellious states “shall be free and remain free.”
This announcement fundamentally changed the goal of the Civil War from preserving the nation to also abolishing slavery, but that did not happen overnight, as Hassan Kwame Jeffries, a history professor at Ohio State University, explains: “It took time for the news to reach the rest of the Confederacy and its states and slaveholders that the war had ended and so had slavery.”
Two years it took for the news to reach Texas as there were no means of communication and media to emancipate the slaves there.
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