Juneteenth: The long road to becoming a federal holiday

Sue Johnson was born and raised in Galveston, Texas, a city on the Gulf Coast. She still remembers every year when she and her family would pack up the car and head to the beach for a day of celebration to commemorate America’s second independence day: Juneteenth. 

So when the day became America’s newest federal holiday in 2021, she was thrilled. 

“I was as jubilant as many,” said Johnson, founder and executive director of Galveston’s Nia Cultural Center. “I was very happy that it will be commemorated throughout the country … and I was also curious to see how it would play out in the new arena of being nationally sanctioned.” 

Juneteenth is recognized June 19 to commemorate the last of the enslaved peoples being freed in Galveston by Union forces. Though the city of Galveston has celebrated the holiday since 1866, the push to make the day a federal holiday dates back more than 100 years. 

On June 19, 1865, Gordon Granger issued General Order No. 3, which declared, “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.” 

President Abraham Lincoln had legally freed the enslaved in Texas more than two years previously with the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. But the nearly 250,000 enslaved people in Galveston had no idea they had been freed. 

“The information hadn’t reached them yet,” said Kabria Baumgartner, associate professor of History and Africana Studies and associate director of Public History at Northeastern University.

But that doesn’t mean the order was necessarily accepted by parts of the Confederacy. Some enslavers continued to keep the information from those they had enslaved, utilizing the forced labor for one more harvest season. 

“There was pushback in other parts of the Confederacy, even though it became pretty clear at that point that the Confederacy had lost the war,” Baumgartner said. 

Eventually, though, the emancipation of enslaved peoples was accepted. 

Early Juneteenth celebrations were primarily held in Texas following General Order No. 3.

“African Americans, even then, referred to it as a freedom celebration,” Baumgartner said. “And then from there, the holiday spread to other parts of the South into Oklahoma, and then California and Wisconsin by the 20th century, and it became a wider celebration.” 

Newspaper articles from these early celebrations recount African Americans celebrating the day with a dinner and discussion and marches through the street. 

Then, in 1872, a group of African American ministers and businessmen in Houston bought 10 acres of land and declared the property Emancipation Park to be used for annual Juneteenth celebrations.

“By the 20th century, it’s some of the same forms of celebration: food and music and conversation,” Baumgartner said. “And people are referring to it as Black People’s Independence Day.”

Today, Juneteenth is also called Emancipation Day, Freedom Day and Jubilee Day.  

But there’s a second part of General Order No. 3 that often gets overlooked. That part called for “an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves.” 

It’s this line, historian Sam Collins told The Hill, that made the Galveston emancipation different from others. 

“Absolute equality is not about everyone having equal results. Absolute equality is about creating a climate or environment or community where every human being has an equal opportunity to become the best version of themselves without hurdles or barriers hindering their growth or development,” said Collins, who serves on the board of the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Ruby Bridges Foundation.

But the way in which this order was delivered was also an important part of the story: When the orders were presented in Galveston, the city became occupied by Black troops, said Collins.

According to the African American Civil War Museum, when African Americans were finally allowed to join the armed forces in July 1862 — nearly a year-and-a-half after the start of the war — United States Colored Troops (USCT) accounted for more than 10 percent of the Union Army and 25 percent of the Union Navy.

These numbers were staggering, considering African Americans made up only 1 percent of the Northern population. 

“While Granger is there and has been celebrated as the hero of the Juneteenth story, he was not alone,” said Collins, co-founder of Galveston’s Nia Cultural Center Juneteenth Legacy Project Headquarters. “Some reports estimate as high as 75 percent [of soldiers] were United States Colored Troops.”

The contributions of these USCT are part of why many considered the fight for Juneteenth’s federal status so important: It would help educate a nation on a day that many were unaware of.

It wasn’t until the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers in 2020 that attention around Juneteenth really began to grow, said Collins.

“Juneteenth did not become more important in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd, but it became more popular and with that popularity. The petition received increased signatures,” he explained. “There were not many signatures on the petition before the murder of George Floyd, but the consciousness of the country was kind of shaken or awakened.”

That petition was created by activist Opal Lee, who at the time was 94 years old. Lee was born and raised in Texas, and at the age of 12, a white mob torched her family’s home — on Juneteenth.

“It is not lost on me that the summer of 2020 saw the largest support of Juneteenth to be a national holiday because of the death of George Floyd highlighted the systemic racism that still exists because of the residual effects of slavery,” Lee wrote in her petition. “We can’t let the swell of support just simply disappear until the summer rolls around again. We have make sure Congress follows through with their commitment to honor the lives of those who came before us.”

Lee, known today as the grandmother of Juneteenth, had her goal achieved in 2021, when President Biden signed legislation marking June 19 as a federal holiday. She was present for the signing. 

“By making Juneteenth a federal holiday, all Americans can feel the power of this day, and learn from our history, and celebrate progress, and grapple with the distance we’ve come but the distance we have to travel,” Biden said. 

“Great nations don’t ignore their most painful moments,” he added. “They don’t ignore those moments of the past. They embrace them. Great nations don’t walk away. We come to terms with the mistakes we made. And in remembering those moments, we begin to heal and grow stronger.”

When Biden signed the legislation making Juneteenth a federal holiday, recognizing “America’s original sin,” he was also surrounded by prominent Black figures including Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.), and Reps. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.), Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), Danny K. Davis (D-Ill.), Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio) and Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas). These leaders, as well as others, had helped lead the push for the federal legislation. 

But they weren’t the first ones to urge the nation to legally recognize the holiday. The effort to make Juneteenth a federal holiday had been in the works since the 1800s.

Back in 1879, Texas State Rep. Robert Evans (R) tried to pass legislation declaring Juneteenth a holiday. It would take 100 years before State Rep. Albert Ely Edwards (D) authored House Bill 1016 to make Juneteenth a paid holiday in Texas. 

Edwards, who died just one year before Biden’s signing, became known as Mr. Juneteenth. 

Meanwhile, Opal Lee worked with another name that often goes unheard: Ronald Myers.

Myers worked for more than 25 years in the push to federally recognize Juneteenth, even establishing the Juneteenth Observance Foundation. He died in 2018.

“We’ve forgotten the contributions of these individuals that came before us that laid the groundwork and laid the foundation on which we stand today,” Collins said. “This is history that is not taught in the classroom. It’s not taught in our mainstream schools. So this is the history that we have to continue to share, to tell the truth of what happened.”