Today, Juneteenth, may be our most important national holiday. I say this not because it’s our newest federal holiday, but because it’s about the process of becoming, for some of us becoming free, and for all of us becoming a nation more consistent with what we claim to be our ideals.

Today is nominally about what happened in Galveston, Texas on June 19^th, 1865. General Gordon Granger had arrived at the port of Galveston to take command of over 2000 Union troops to enforce emancipation and begin the hard road to reconstruction. This was 900 days after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect, and over two months after the surrender of the Confederacy. On that day the general issued General Order Number Three which began with the words, “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free…” Imagine the jubilation.

(The photo is of an Emancipation Day celebration band in 1900. It is available courtesy of the Austin History Center and is credited to Mrs. Charles Stephenson.)

But this holiday is more than a mere commemoration of one historic event. For so long it stood in for other events and realities worthy of being marked that had not received official recognition. Until Juneteenth became a federal holiday three years ago, there was no national celebration of emancipation, no official day to solemnly commemorate the end of chattel slavery in this country!

This holiday that we’re celebrating means different things to different people. It comes out of Black America, and certainly sits more deeply in the spirits of Black Americans than it could possibly sit in mine. In a very important way, this, that started as a local Texas observance, has become the Independence Day for Black America.

But it’s important that we recognize that this has to be a holiday for all people in this country. Again, for Black people descended from people who were enslaved, it’s a celebration of liberation. In addition, for them, but also for white people and everyone else, it’s a celebration of when our nation took an important, but insufficient, step forward toward making the ideal of a “Land of the Free” a reality.

Juneteenth was an aspirational observance in 1865 or 1866, and it remains one today. Celebrating freedom in this country has always meant committing to making it a more authentic reality. For decades, when Black Americans lived under a reign of terrorism in the southern United States, and when equal rights remained shamefully elusive in the north, this precious day, often celebrated in secret, was a challenge to reach further. Which always took courage. Today is a day to celebrate the courageous reachers, those past, those still living among us, and those to come. Let’s honor them and tell their stories.

This is a day that commemorates the revelation of freedom, that remembers when walls were torn down which had been erected around the truth by those who wanted to keep profiting from what people did not know, that they were already entitled to the same rights as those who had enslaved them. This remains an aspirational holiday because the fruits of freedom are still not equally accessible to all, because the ideological descendants of the deceivers still have a disproportionate share of power and still manage to keep too many of us divided, confused, and disheartened.

Today is a day for all of us to celebrate in the shade by the river, and to commit to acting in such a way that we have more to celebrate
with each passing June nineteenth.

Happy Juneteenth!