Here is historian Peniel Joseph at CNN:
Juneteenth commemorates the June 19, 1865, announcement of the end of slavery by a Union major general in Texas. Long celebrated in Black communities from coast to coast, it has been a Texas state holiday since 1980 and is a strong Lone Star tradition — though in the years since, every state but South Dakota has decided to mark it in some way. (Only a few of those states observe it as a paid holiday.)
For me, Juneteenth is the answer to Frederick Douglass’ towering 1852 address, “What to the slave is the Fourth of July?” In Rochester, New York, Douglass, an enslaved Black man turned abolitionist, newspaper editor and publisher and outspoken civil rights activist, railed against the hypocrisy of a nation that dared to celebrate an ideal of freedom in an age of chattel slavery.
Douglass challenged his audience to recognize Black humanity by embracing abolition-democracy, which comprised not just the end of slavery but required transforming America into a multiracial democracy for the first time in its history.
Having Juneteenth as a national holiday offers a generational opportunity for Americans to discuss reparations for racial slavery, Jim Crow segregation and the inequities of poverty, health care disparities and violence that are their legacy. But one year after transformative protests and a widespread corporate embrace of Juneteenth, much of this country is showing itself to be unready or unwilling to have those conversations.
Read the entire piece here.
