Today we celebrate Juneteenth and as of Thursday, it is an officially recognized federal holiday in the United States. After Congress passed the legislation, President Biden rushed to sign it on June 17 to ensure that it was effective this year.
My Facebook feed was flooded with comments ranging from happiness to surprise to skepticism. How could this gridlocked Congress which has ground to a halt around issues of protecting voting rights and correcting decades of underinvestment in needed critical infrastructure bring itself to pass...a holiday?
I draw upon my own experience with recognitions of chattel slavery to put this moment in context. As a child of a Caribbean mother, "Emancipation Day", was no stranger to me. On August 1, most English-speaking Caribbean countries celebrate the formal end of slavery in the British Empire and have done so for generations. When I learned of Juneteenth as a kid, I was surprised that the United States didn't have a date. When I was older, I learned about the campaigns to celebrate National Freedom Day (February 1--the date the Emancipation Proclamation was signed) and New Year's Eve Watch Night Service (which originated in our Methodist heritage but has a special meaning for African Americans). My local church started having Juneteenth celebrations in the late 1990s sponsored by our Lay Organization and I learned of the campaign to make it a national holiday.
In 2004, I started my research in Peru and realized that Black activists had rallied around the 150th Anniversary of Emancipation on December 4th to launch major awareness activities and campaigns for Afro-Peruvian cultural recognition. Two years later, the National Congress of Peru would approve June 4 as "National Afro-Peruvian Culture Day" in homage to the birthday of renowned poet Nicomedes Santa Cruz and in 2014 it would become a month celebrated by the Ministry of Culture. Throughout this process, I listened to Afro-Peruvian activists admire the United States for its recognition of Black culture and the fact that we even had a holiday celebrating Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In 2007, the Peruvian government issued a national apology for slavery to the Afro-Peruvian population--something that the United States government still has not done. Policies created that address the impact of structural racism, however, are few and far between.
James Baldwin and others have written about the price African-Americans pay for citizenship and our ongoing quest for recognition and honoring of our civil and human rights. We didn't need the federal government to approve a holiday that had grown into a celebration throughout the Black community. Nonetheless, recognition matters. There's a reason why the Congressional hearings about Tulsa, Rosewood, the Tuskegee experiment, police brutality all matter because we the country to recognize the hurt and pain that have been ignominiously meted out to African Americans for generations. When I read the biography of Deaconess Opal Lee, she stated that one of the reasons that she advocated for a Juneteenth holiday was to honor her family and the fact that at age eight she and her parents were driven from their homes for settling in a White neighborhood in Texas.
Recognitions are important honoring and recognizing our presence is long overdue. But as with all healing, after you recognize the problem you must do something about it. HR1 (For The People Act), HR4 (John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act), and HR 1280 (George Floyd Policing Act) are now essential more than ever and the irony is not lost that in Texas--the state which originated Juneteenth--laws were passed to suppress the teaching of critical race theory.
So enjoy your Juneteenth. Celebrate that our country has joined others in publicly recognizing that slavery did exist and extol the resilience of our ancestors! Then email and call your Congressperson and Senators on Monday to tell them to do the rest of the job. | 
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