When freedom became real

As we urged a year ago, Juneteenth will become a national holiday, the bill having passed both houses of Congress and winning President Biden’s signature on Thursday. With the news already being digested by stomachs made sick by America’s perpetual culture wars, all, no matter their political persuasion, should take a moment to try in good faith to understand what the day signifies and why it remains important to recall.

Juneteenth, long recognized by Black Americans and already either a ceremonial or formal holiday in 48 states and Washington, D.C., began as a celebration of the moment on June 19, 1865, when Union Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger proclaimed the emancipation of enslaved people in Texas, bringing word of freedom to thousands in bondage. In the decades since, the holiday has grown into a larger commemoration of the end of slavery in America — as large a milestone in this nation’s progress as the date of the Pilgrims’ landing, or the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

It is that milestone for two reasons. First, because slavery itself was an institution designed to break spirits and families and cultures, the aggressive daily assertion that millions of Americans were subhuman; ending it was the necessary beginning of a moral cleansing. But the second reason is equally important: slavery’s end did not magically usher in a new era of equality. Vestiges of the institution, and racism that reared its head in countless ways over the ensuing generations, remained.

Many still remain today, keeping the people of our nation separate and unequal in far too many ways despite remarkable progress since the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

When Juneteenth joins the canon as America’s 11th federally recognized holiday, granting all U.S. government employees a day off to mark a momentous change in America’s still far-from-complete odyssey toward living up to its founding promise, it will signify the nation’s ability to grow past its brutally racist beginnings. And it will remind us that we remain a work in progress.