Juneteenth became a federal holiday this week, but as Vice President Kamala Harris noted at the bill signing, there's a lot Americans don't know about its history.
It is no small feat in this highly partisan era that politicians, who cannot agree on a commission to study the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection or what should go into an infrastructure bill, came together to create a holiday commemorating the moment people in Texas learned the emancipation had finally come.
When those who had been enslaved finally got the news, they deemed it proper to celebrate the moment. For Haitian Americans, Jan. 1 marks the anniversary of when their enslaved ancestors were emancipated. The first Black republic’s Declaration of Independence came around 60 years before the American Civil War, after a slave rebellion bested the French army.In the U.S. capital, April 16 commemorates the day in 1862 that President Lincoln approved legislation that freed around 3,000 enslaved people and compensated slaveholders for their financial loss.
“We want history to move along in a nice neat chronological order, but the struggle against racism has gone backward and forwards for decades,” Blackmon said.In 1980, Texas became the first state to make it a holiday. But Black activists wanted national recognition, and have lobbied Congress for decades.Fort Worth resident Opal Lee, 94, who walked from her hometown in Texas to Washington in 2016 to bring attention to the effort, was at the White House for Thursday’s signing ceremony.
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