By Himanee Gupta, associate chair of the Department of Historical Studies 

Last year, newly elected President Joe Biden declared Juneteenth a national holiday. In doing so, he called attention to a historic event that has been celebrated among Black communities throughout the U.S. but was largely unfamiliar to most other Americans. 

Biden issued the proclamation just months after U.S. voters had elected him alongside his running mate Kamala Harris (the nation’s first Black, South Asian, and Afro-Caribbean female vice president) amid a time of rising racially motivated violence, violence marked in part by the efforts of white supremacist groups to take over the U.S. Capitol to keep the presidential election results from being certified by Congress. While the move might have been politically strategic, it also has opened a window into how histories are made, remembered, forgotten, or simply ignored. Celebrating Juneteenth – a day that many Black leaders call the nation’s “other Independence Day” – thus becomes a way of speaking truth to power by opening our eyes to the histories we might have once learned but have been encouraged via media discourses on American life to disregard. 

Juneteenth is June 19. This year’s official holiday will be Monday, June 20. Juneteenth marks the date of June 19, 1865, when the last enslaved Blacks learned they had been legally freed. As a 2019 article written for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History & Culture states: 

“On “Freedom’s Eve,” or the eve of January 1, 1863, the first Watch Night services took place. On that night, enslaved and free African Americans gathered in churches and private homes all across the country awaiting news that the Emancipation Proclamation had taken effect. At the stroke of midnight, prayers were answered as all enslaved people in Confederate States were declared legally free.” 

But the Emancipation Proclamation could not be executed in states still under Confederate control. The Civil War was still raging, and in the westernmost Confederate state of Texas, few were aware of President Abraham Lincoln’s executive order. 

Word came to Texas after the war ended. On June 19, 1865, 2,000 Union troops arrived in Galveston Bay, with word that 250,000 enslaved Blacks were free by executive decree. Texan Blacks declared the day Juneteenth. 

I first learned of Juneteenth in 1987. I was a young reporter for the Kansas City Star and had been sent by the news desk to cover a Juneteenth parade and festival. I remember speeches, music, a marching band performance, and fabulous food. I also remember wondering why so few people knew of Juneteenth and why it was not celebrated more widely. 

The answer, of course, has been the nation’s reluctance to come to terms with its many historic legacies of oppression and violence: Slavery, genocide and land dispossession of Native peoples, anti-Asian immigration policies, and ongoing xenophobia that persists into the third decade of the 21st century. Naming Juneteenth as a national holiday is a step toward undoing that silence. Taking that step might be uncomfortable, but it is necessary and ultimately empowering. 

Himanee Gupta, Ph.D., is associate chair of the Department of Historical Studies and author of Muncie, India(na): Middletown and Asian America. To learn more about Juneteenth, check out the National Museum of African American History and Culture’s curated Reading List.