Juneteenth, which has been a national holiday since 2021, marks the day when the Union Army entered the city of Galveston on June 19, 1865, and formally freed those who still were being enslaved in Texas.
As the Union Army advanced through the South in the final months of the Civil War, Confederate slave-owners in states such as Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas forced tens of thousands of slaves to go to Texas, which was the only Southern state where the Union Army had not taken full control during the Civil War.
Until Major General Gordon Granger issued his order on June 19, more than 250,000 enslaved individuals in Texas had been unaware that they were free men, even though the Emancipation Proclamation had been issued more than two years earlier (on January 1, 1863) and the South had surrendered on April 9, 1865.
Juneteenth celebrations began as early as the following year and expanded over the decades across the country. However, they remained largely local celebrations until President Joe Biden signed into law the official observance of Juneteenth as a federal holiday.
Juneteenth serves to remind us of our nation’s tragic past and of the hope for a better future, as often expressed by Dr. Martin Luther King: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
However, that arc has reversed course in the past few months. The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent evisceration of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (which had created Black-majority voting districts to ensure persons of color would be represented in Congress in the South), has turned back the clock, allowing for gross gerrymandering of Congressional districts that will largely eliminate Black representation.
In addition, many states, especially Texas, have enacted laws that have criminalized traditional voter registration efforts that sought to bring Blacks and Latinos into the political process. These new laws, which have resulted in the arrests of voting-rights activists, have cast a pall of fear that are significantly reducing Black and Latino voter registration in Southern states.
It is not an exaggeration to say that, thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court and Republican-dominated state legislatures in the Southern states, a 21st century version of Jim Crow (the term used for the post-Civil War laws that marginalized former slaves in the political process) is on the rise in the South.
So as we celebrate Juneteenth, let us resolve to restore the broken arc of the moral universe in order to ensure the full participation in our democracy by every American.