The fight that never ends<\/p>\n
Juneteenth is not a recent invention. It was born June 19, 1865, in Galveston, Texas, when Union Major General Gordon Granger read General Order No. 3: \u201cThe people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.\u201d More than two and a half years had passed since Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Texas\u2019s 250,000 enslaved people were the last to be told.<\/p>\n
The freed people of Texas began celebrating that date the very next year. Barred from public parks in some cities, they pooled their money and bought land. They called those places Emancipation Park. Texas made June 19 a state holiday in 1980. Congress made it a federal holiday in 2021, unanimously in the Senate. It is not \u201cwoke.\u201d It predates any political agenda by more than a century. The contributions of Black Americans to this nation are foundational and immeasurable \u2013 including the music we think of as quintessentially American. Blues, jazz, gospel, rock \u2019n\u2019 roll all trace their roots to African musical traditions, carried through the Middle Passage and transformed into an art form that changed the world.<\/p>\n
And yet the Trump administration has shown nothing but contempt for Black history, Black heroes and Black Americans themselves. The list should be named: Donald Trump removed Juneteenth and MLK Day from National Park Service free entry days, replacing them with his own birthday. He restored Confederate monuments \u2013 built not to honor the dead but to intimidate the living, erected during Jim Crow and the Civil Rights era as symbols of white resistance to Black equality \u2013 and reinstated Confederate names to military bases that Congress had just renamed. He ordered removal of exhibits depicting slavery from Independence Hall and Fort Pulaski. The Defense Intelligence Agency paused observances of Juneteenth, Black History Month and Holocaust Remembrance Day. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared \u201cidentity months dead.\u201d<\/p>\n