President Biden: The NEW one and only politics thread

Juneteenth has been a celebration for some people since 1866.

But it was a niche thing, and it was largely forgotten for decades at a time. It was revived during the civil rights era, and Texas made it a state holiday in 1979.

But what I said wasn't wrong. It was virtually unknown to the majority of the country, until there was a movement to elevate it in the late 2010s, which led to it being turned into a national holiday in 2021.

 

It was a regional celebration. There are a lot of things like it -- some very important to the lives of a group of people -- that have been forgotten or were really important in one place, but didn't enter the consciousness of people in other places. We have turned it into a holiday to celebrate the end of slavery, but June 19th was actually the day when Major General Grander ordered the final enforcement of the Emanicipation Proclamation. ... in Texas. The act itself isn't what Juneteenth became about, either. It became a day of church gatherings in the years afterward. And the celebration was largely unknown for the longest time outside of Texas and the south.

There were states -- for example, Kentucky -- where people remained enslaved for months after June 19th, because they had their own specific history of emancipation having been carried out. Their stories were important to various people, too, but got lost to history. In some cases, black slaves weren't freed until the reconstruction treaties. There is a separate history there.

I'd say yeah, maybe this is white people having scrubbed history if it was more of a universal historical moment similar to the kinds of things kids learn about in schools, and everyone just ignored it. But there are a number of regional stories LIKE the story of Juneteenth, that were largely forgotten, and it's not like the Emancipation Proclamation itself was scrubbed from history.

It's great that we have elevated it into a catch-all to celebrate the ending of slavery. But at the time, it's not like the country as a whole saw June 19th as a historical moment of note. It was an act -- a general signing a piece of paper in Galveston, Texas -- that gave rise to what were very regionalized celebrations until we recently elevated it into the symbol of the ending of slavery.