Next month, America will commemorate the date, 250 years ago, that its founders signed the Declaration of Independence, declaring in the process “that all men are created equal.” And yet it took nearly another century for the new nation to apply those words to African Americans.
As we celebrate our country and its tradition of individual liberty, we should also celebrate June 19, or Juneteenth, the day that freedom finally extended to black Americans.
President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, freeing everyone held in slavery, but it could only be enforced in places under Union control. As a result, it took time for news of emancipation to reach the entire enslaved population.
Texas was the final Confederate state to surrender, and on June 19, 1865, Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger announced the end of the war, and with it, the end of chattel slavery. At the time, Texas’ enslaved population totaled 250,000, and Granger’s announcement freed them all at once.
Over the years, the date became cause for celebration, first in Texas and then more broadly: In 2004, then-President George W. Bush issued a statement on Juneteenth, a date he said “recognizes the progress America has made in ensuring that our Nation lives up to our founding principles of liberty, equality, and justice, and represents an occasion to reaffirm our commitment to these principles.”
Granted, nothing legally changed on that day: Emancipation had been in effect for more than two years, and the 13th Amendment codifying abolition into the Constitution would not be ratified for a few more months.
And of course, it took another amendment to grant African Americans citizenship, plus another to give black men the right to vote. (And that’s to say nothing of the Jim Crow regime that denied black Southerners their legal voting rights for nearly another century.)
But it was still a momentous day for the simple fact that the last Americans held in bondage gained their freedom. That alone is worth celebrating.
Some have resisted the prospect of formally recognizing Juneteenth. In 2021, Congress voted overwhelmingly to make it a federal holiday. One of the dissenters, then-Rep. Matt Rosendale (R–Mont.), said “the Left” had invented Juneteenth “in order to continually make Americans feel bad and convince them that our country is evil.”
But history is full of cases in which even America’s Founders failed to live up to their own promises. The authors of the Declaration of Independence, who wrote that “all men are created equal,” themselves owned slaves. As president, John Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Acts into law, criminalizing dissent barely a decade after the First Amendment was ratified.
These examples don’t show America to be evil; they show that even the Founders failed to live up to their own ambitious ideals.
“‘Juneteenth’ is an affront to the unity of July 4th,” the late conservative activist Charlie Kirk tweeted in 2021. “We now have 2 summer holidays—and one of them based on race.”
But the only reason we ever had two such days in the first place is that for decades, America’s Independence Day didn’t apply to all Americans. In the years before abolition, many African Americans observed other dates, most prominently July 5, though some also celebrated January 1, commemorating the day in 1808 that the U.S. ban on the transatlantic slave trade went into effect.
“The 4th of July is the first great fact in your nation’s history—the very ring-bolt in the chain of your yet undeveloped destiny,” the great abolitionist orator Frederick Douglass, himself formerly enslaved, told a mostly white crowd in an 1852 speech.
But, Douglass added, this didn’t apply to those held in bondage: “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.”
“This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine,” Douglass said. “You may rejoice, I must mourn.”
This year, there are apparently dueling 250th anniversary celebrations: A decade ago, Congress passed legislation to create America250, a bipartisan commission that would plan “the commemoration of the history of the United States leading up to the 250th anniversary.” Then last year, in characteristic fashion, President Donald Trump apparently decided to simply scrap everything and start from scratch on a plan tailored to his personal preferences. As Michael Scherer reported at The Atlantic, the Trump administration created Freedom 250, a competing and more overtly partisan celebration.
“Several of Freedom 250’s planned events and monuments lack obvious connections to the Boston Tea Party, the signing of the Declaration of Independence or other seminal moments in the nation’s founding,” The New York Times wrote in February. “Rather, they are tailored to Mr. Trump’s political agenda and his penchant for spectacle, personal branding and legacy.”
Case in point: building a giant steel canopy to hold an Ultimate Fighting Championship event on the South Lawn of the White House, which took place on Trump’s birthday but was branded as a Freedom 250 celebration of patriotism.
Neither Freedom 250 nor the Department of the Interior responded when Reason asked if there were any events planned to commemorate Juneteenth, though Freedom 250’s website and X account contain no mention.
That’s a shame; Juneteenth deserves a place in any celebration of America, freedom, and the best of what the nation has accomplished.
“The nation’s 250th year is a celebration that belongs to every American,” Freedom 250 CEO Keith Krach said in a statement. “At its core, this is about celebrating freedom, honoring where we have been, and inspiring the next 250 years of the American story.”
Indeed. But celebrating freedom means also celebrating the day that freedom came to a portion of the population that was denied it for generations. As we celebrate America and its independence, we should also celebrate Juneteenth.
