Juneteenth should be paid holiday in every state

Sunday is Father’s Day, but the day also marks a more important reason to commemorate and celebrate.

Sunday is also Juneteenth, a portmanteau word for June 19, that marks the day in 1865 when the Union army arrived in Galveston, Texas and announced that the Civil War had ended, and slavery had been abolished throughout the Confederate South. Texas was the last state of the Confederacy with institutional slavery.

President Lincoln had declared slavery abolished with his Emancipation Proclamation on New Year’s Day in 1863. The executive order stated, “that all persons held as slaves,” including those enslaved throughout the South, “are, and henceforth shall be free.” The Proclamation applied to the 3.5 million slaves in 10 states that were in rebellion in 1863, but not the 500,000 slaves in the four border states, Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland and Delaware, which had not seceded. Those slaves were freed by later state and federal actions.

In June 1963, President Kennedy invoked the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation when he went on national television to address Americans about civil rights. The president specifically discussed how two Black students had been admitted to the University of Alabama, but only with the aid and protection of the National Guard against Gov. George Wallace’s objections. Kennedy called it a moral issue: “One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free. We preach freedom around the world, and we mean it, and we cherish our freedom here at home, but are we to say to the world, and much more importantly, to each other that this is a land of the free except for the Negroes; that we have no second-class citizens except Negroes; that we have no class or caste system, no ghettoes, no master race except with respect to Negroes? Now the time has come for this nation to fulfill its promise.”

Juneteenth is a National Day of Independence for Black Americans, but only recently has the day been widely recognized after recent mass protests forged by the #BlackLivesMatter movement. It didn’t become an official state-paid holiday until Texas made it one in 1980, but at that time state offices would not close for the day but would be staffed by skeleton crews. By 2020, only the Lone Star State had adopted Juneteenth as a state-paid holiday. On June 17, 2021, President Biden officially designated June 19 as Juneteenth National Independence Day as a federal holiday. This year, for the first time, Illinois will recognize Juneteenth as a legal state-paid holiday, along with Connecticut, Colorado, Delaware, Maine, Michigan, South Dakota, Utah, Washington state and Washington, D.C. Along with Texas, the states of Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York and Virginia also recognize Juneteenth as a legal holiday. Because Juneteenth falls on a Sunday this year, it will be celebrated on Monday, June 20. Some states will celebrate the day on Friday, June 17. In New Jersey, the holiday is observed on the third Friday in June.

Why it took 155 years for this day to become an officially recognized national holiday is disconcerting, and why every state in the union does not recognize Juneteenth as a legal state-paid holiday is beyond me, given our nation’s recent history of racial turmoil. More state legislatures should get on board and on the right side of history by officially designating this day as one when employees should receive a day off work to celebrate Juneteenth in their own way.

Will Buss teaches broadcasting and journalism at Western Illinois University.

This article originally appeared on The McDonough County Voice: Juneteenth should be paid holiday nationwide