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OPINION (THE DAILY SIGNAL) – This Wednesday, America will celebrate Juneteenth as a federal holiday for the fourth time. Yet the holiday, born out of bipartisanship, is becoming more divisive each year.
The Left has co-opted Juneteenth to push for radical racial policies such as reparations and exclude most Americans from its celebration. As a result, many conservatives now oppose the federal holiday.
But in the eyes of this Texas historian, it’s a mistake to abandon a unifying national holiday to the manipulations of the Left. We should instead do what conservatives are best at: Get back to the roots.
Until the past four years, Juneteenth was an uncontroversial celebration of American freedom and the end of slavery in Texas. The holiday commemorates the day Union Gen. Gordon Granger issued General Order No. 3 in Galveston, informing Texas of the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing the state’s slaves, and marking the end of slavery under the Confederacy.
The next year, in 1866, residents of Galveston began celebrating “Jubilee Day,” which eventually became what we know as Juneteenth. In 1979, Al Edwards, a Democratic state representative from Houston, sponsored legislation to make Juneteenth a paid state holiday. Texas Gov. Bill Clements, a Republican, signed the bill into law, and the holiday was born.
The national acceptance of Juneteenth also began in a bipartisan fashion. President Donald Trump was the first president to call for its adoption as a federal holiday in 2020, although it took a year for Congress to act. When it did, the bill passed the Senate with unanimous consent and 415-14 in the House.
With that kind of history, one would expect conservatives, even those wary of the pitfalls of identity politics like me, to embrace Juneteenth’s consistency with the principles enshrined in our founding documents.
The holiday celebrates what President Abraham Lincoln called “a new birth of freedom” for America. It celebrates the completion of the work of July 4, 1776—the extension of liberty to all Americans. It also commemorates the untold numbers of young men who died in the war fighting for that freedom.
