On a recent afternoon, Dr. Zebulon Miletsky and a colleague were discussing whether or not they have the day off from work on Friday, June 18. She thought they did, and he didn’t know.
June 18 is the day before Juneteenth, which falls on a Saturday this year. If Juneteenth were a holiday like July 4, Miletsky, an associate professor of Africana studies at Stony Brook University, would know that he could make plans for a three-day weekend celebration.
“From what I can tell, the way Juneteenth is being implemented around the country is being done inconsistently,” he said.
And he’s right. Because Juneteenth isn’t a federal holiday, each state decides independently how or if they acknowledge the date.
Texas Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee and a bipartisan senate commission is leading the latest push to make Juneteenth a national holiday. Renewed attention to the day came last year after the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and a nationwide galvanizing of Black Lives Matter protests.
Universities responded with videos of athletes explaining what Juneteenth was; college presidents sent out official messaging, many giving a day off to mark the occasion. In March of this year, the University System of Maryland made Juneteenth an official holiday, giving all faculty, staff and students the day off.
On June 19, 1865, Union Soldiers under the helm of General Gordon Granger descended into Galveston, a small island on the Gulf Coast of Texas, near Houston. There they found over 250,000 persons still enslaved, despite the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in January of 1865. A decree was read, bringing an official end to slavery in the United States. Almost immediately after, celebrations and parties sprung up spontaneously throughout the United States, and the date became known as Juneteenth.
