What to Know About Juneteenth 

(Bloomberg) -- It’s a celebration of Black history and freedom that relatively few white Americans had heard of until recently. Now, Juneteenth has been designated a federal holiday. It was propelled into the mainstream in 2020 by sweeping protests against racial injustice that prompted dozens of corporations to give their employees a day off.

1. What is Juneteenth?

The holiday gets its name from June 19, 1865. That’s the day the Union army arrived in Galveston, Texas, to announce that all African-American slaves in the state were free in accordance with President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. The state was the last in the Confederacy to receive word that the Civil War was over and that slavery had been abolished, and the last where the federal Army established its authority.

2. What’s been its significance?

As early as 1866, freed African Americans in Texas held a celebration on the date to commemorate the end of slavery. As Black families emigrated from the southern U.S. after the Great Depression, observance spread throughout the country. In 1968, shortly after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, his Poor People’s Campaign held a Juneteenth Solidarity Day, giving the holiday a new prominence in the civil rights movement.

3. Is it an official holiday?

In 1980, the Texas legislature made it an official state holiday. Currently, 47 states and the District of Columbia mark the occasion as a holiday or a day of observation. But the holiday was still little known enough in 2017 outside the Black community that the television show “Black-ish” could build an episode around how few of the show’s White characters had heard of it.

4. Why has it been gaining prominence?

In recent years, a number of Juneteenth commemorations were tied to themes raised by Black Lives Matter, a protest movement that was founded in response to police killings of African Americans. In 2020, the largest ever Black Lives Matter protests erupted around the nation in after George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis in late May. The protests that followed led to the widest ever observance of Juneteenth.

5. How did it become a federal holiday?

On June 16, the Senate voted by unanimous consent to make Juneteenth the 11th annual national holiday on the federal calendar and the House of Representatives passed a similar measure by a vote of 415-14 the next day. President Joe Biden signed it into law hours later. “Great nations don’t ignore their most painful moments,” he said, praising the “overwhelming bipartisan support.” A proposal in 2020 by Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, to make Juneteenth a holiday had been blocked by Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin, who objected to the cost. Johnson dropped his objection this year.

6. What will change?

The law will force U.S. employers to decide whether to give their workers a paid day off. Many companies and union contracts peg their holiday schedule to the federal calendar, which will now recognize 11 holidays per year. When June 19 falls on a weekend, as it does in 2021, the holiday will be observed on either the Friday before or the Monday after. Biden directed that federal workers will be off this year on June 18, a Friday.

7. Which companies had already made it a holiday?

The trend began in 2020 when Jack Dorsey made Juneteenth a formal company holiday at Twitter Inc. and Square Inc., both of which he leads. Vox Media Inc., Nike Inc., the New York Times, J.C. Penney Co., Qatalyst Partners, Spotify Technology SA and Quicken Loans and the National Football League all followed suit, while Facebook Inc. canceled meetings that day for a “day of learning” about the experience of Black Americans. MasterCard gave employees the day off and encouraged them to educate themselves about the history of racism in America or volunteer with a civil rights organization.

The Reference Shelf

• An article for PBS by the Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates on “What Is Juneteenth?”
• The websites of juneteenth.com and nationaljuneteenth.com, organizations that promote local celebrations.
• An article in the Atlantic on how Juneteenth celebrations came to be tied to protests over police brutality against African Americans.

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