Our View: Juneteenth complements Fourth of July

Among many reasons for creating a national Juneteenth holiday, the most important is that it commemorates the symbolic end of America’s original sin of slavery.

It’s why the Senate unanimously consented this week to establish June 19 or Juneteenth (a portmanteau or blend of June and nineteenth) as a federal holiday, followed by the overwhelming approval of the House and President Joe Biden’s signature Thursday.

It doesn’t mean there aren’t naysayers about the idea of creating a federal holiday to remember June 19, 1865, when the last of the enslaved within the former Confederacy were told they were finally free.

Fourteen House members voted against the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act on Wednesday, citing as objections that there are already enough federal holidays, that the name of the law was somehow confusing, or that it contained a hidden liberal subtext aimed at celebrating identity politics. None is a valid reason.

Nor is it correct, as some in the Black community have asserted, that Juneteenth is the nation’s true celebration of independence.

In reality, the two are connected in U.S. history. Juneteenth complements Independence Day.

The former is a fuller expression of the latter. The Declaration of Independence approved by the Second Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, contained words that this new nation would aspire to live by, that “all men are created equal.” (Written, with irony, by a slaveholding Thomas Jefferson.)

That awful discordancy of abiding enslavement in a “free” land would finally plunge America into a bloody Civil War. President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of Jan. 1, 1863, proclaimed an end to bondage within the Confederacy. But the power of that document did not reach the last rebellious regions until Union soldiers took control of Texas more than two years later.

“All slaves are free,” Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger announced on that June 19 in Galveston. “This involves an absolute equality (emphasis added) of personal rights and rights of property, between former masters and slaves.”

Lincoln by then was gone, assassinated two months before. But the end of slavery in the Confederacy (and in all former border states with the ratification of the 13th Amendment six months later) at least began fulfilling the promise of America’s founding and giving it, as Lincoln said at Gettysburg, “a new birth of freedom.”

Yet when it comes to celebrating freedom, Juneteenth, much like July 4, remains only aspirational.

The era of Jim Crow would follow the Civil War within a generation. Women would continue being denied the right to vote for more than half a century. And racial and gender disparities persist to this day.

In the end, the most widely recognized national holidays exist only as moments to pause and reflect – to give thanks, celebrate the achievement of labor, remember the fallen, mark national independence and, now, recognize the end of slavery.

It’s why we have refrained from our frequent practice of publishing an opposing view to our editorial – in this instance, our endorsement of a national Juneteenth holiday.

Forty-eight states and the District of Columbia now honor Juneteenth at least with an observance. A growing number are making it a full state holiday. Texas was first in 1980. More recently, there’s been Illinois, Maine, New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia, with more on the way.

And with Biden’s signature, it enters the pantheon of national holidays – where it belongs.