On the Urgency of Juneteenth
Why we celebrate Independence and Emancipation.
Since January 20, 2025, the nation has been paralyzed by fear—fear of diversity, fear of equity, and fear of inclusion. This fear was created by the newly inaugurated president of the United States of America, Donald J. Trump. From business executives to state and local governments, leaders from sea to shining sea have been paralyzed, gripped by fear of embracing the true diversity of this nation.
As we approach the Juneteenth Holiday in 2025, the nation finds itself yet again pondering the value of honoring June 19, 1865 when over 250,000 enslaved black folk learned they were freed. This year marks the 160th commemoration of Juneteenth, and its fourth year as a federal holiday. To appreciate why we must steadfastly embrace this celebration of freedom, we must recall the historical context that led to this holiday.
On July 4, 1776, John Dunlap, a local printer in Philadelphia, printed two hundred copies of the Declaration of Independence—a document announcing the decision of the Continental Congress to break from Great Britain just two days earlier. The second paragraph of this Declaration echoes the sentiments of the delegates representing the Thirteen Colonies, then comprising the United States, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
In his euphoria, John Adams of Massachusetts, later the nation’s second president, envisioned America’s independence from the British Crown being “solemnized with Pomp and Parade with shows, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.”
Yet, in the shadow of Independence Hall, and scattered throughout the Thirteen Colonies, were nearly 700,000 enslaved black folk who were not yet free. For another ninety years, the Fourth of July was just another day for black enslaved folk in America. There was no independence, no liberty, no freedom from the toil of the field, the sting of the whip, and the overall burden of the institution of slavery.
The great black abolitionist Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) captured the essence of this sentiment in his remarks on the Fourth of July in 1852:
Fellow citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask: why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national Independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? And am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your Independence to us?
Douglass sparked a conversation about black folk’s place in this young republic. His critique of the nation’s celebration of independence was one voice among many grappling with what “we the people” meant.
This complex relationship between slavery and the nation’s yearning for liberty reached a climax in the mid-nineteenth century. The day of reckoning for equality was catapulted onto the main stage when an enslaved man from Missouri sued for his and his family’s freedom a few years before Douglass’s address. This case became the testing ground for black citizenship when the United States Supreme Court ruled on the Dred Scott v. Sandford case in March 1857, a decision that ultimately led the nation to a Civil War.
In the majority opinion, Chief Justice Roger Taney questioned black folks’ rights to American citizenship. “The question is simply this,” Taney inquired, “Can a negro, whose ancestors were imported into this country, and sold as slaves, become a member of the political community formed and brought into existence by the constitution of the United States, and as such become entitled to all the rights, and privileges, and immunities, guaranteed by that instrument to the citizen?”
Taney continued his opinion in Scott’s ruling by claiming that black folks “had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bounded to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.” Concluding in that vein, the justice made it clear that Scott, specifically, and black folk in general, were not protected by any of the rights found in the United States Constitution.
The theory of black subservience was challenged by white abolitionist and black thinkers such as Phyllis Wheatley at the very foundation of America. This concept—what the great novelist James Baldwin referred to as “the Lie,” the Lie of black inhumanity, the Lie of black inferiority, the Lie that black folk did not belong in America—ran counter to the true history of black folk in America.
Thus, leaders of the nineteenth century, black and white, began to consider or, shall I say, reconsider the true meanings of the words crafted by the Founding Fathers in the Declaration of Independence. Abolitionists like Sojourner Truth challenged Americans to consider the true humanity of black people in general and black women specifically. Demanding recognition of the dignity of black women, she delivered a rousing address at the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio in 1851:
That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages and lifted over ditches and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, over mud puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man – when I could get it – and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?
Sentiments of this sort and the industrialization of northern urban areas led the nation into a deep divide. Should the institution of slavery continue, should it be contained in current slave holding states, or should it expand as the nation’s borders grew?
In 1861, with the election of Abraham Lincoln as the sixteenth president, the South seceded from the union, thus, ushering the nation into the Civil War, still the bloodiest, deadliest war in American history. Lincoln’s initial goals of the war were to preserve the union; everything else was secondary. By the fall of 1862, due to several Union defeats, and with the urging of abolitionists, Lincoln strategically changed the aims of the war by issuing the preliminary emancipation declaration on September 22, 1862. In this order, Lincoln warned the rebellious Confederate States that enslaved people on their territory would soon be free.
One hundred days later, on January 1, 1863, the president issued the Emancipation Proclamation ending slavery in rebellious areas. Although virtually no slave was freed via that document at the time, the Emancipation Proclamation accepted black men into the Union Army and Navy, enabling the liberated to become liberators.
By the end of the war, almost 200,000 black soldiers and sailors had fought for the Union and freedmen. Following the historian Steven Hann, we should understand the Civil War as the largest slave rebellion in American history.
From Douglass to Truth to Lincoln, black and white folk began making traction by the mid-nineteenth century regarding the abolishment of slavery, thus pushing the counry to live up to the concept of independence that John Adams argued should be celebrated from 1776 onward.
For eighty-nine-years, the nation was still not whole—until April 9, 1865, when Robert E. Lee surrendered the last major Confederate army to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia.
News of the end of the war was slow. But eventually word spread to every nook and cranny of the nation throughout the spring of 1865. America’s second Independence Day arrived on June 19, 1865, when some 2,000 Union troops arrived in Galveston Bay, Texas. The army announced that the more than 250,000 enslaved black people in the state were free by executive decree.
While the nation at large viewed June 19th as just another day on the calendar, black folk largely viewed this day as a day of Jubilee: the beginning of their true Independence and a day that should be honored. However, it was not until 1979 that state and local governments agreed with this sentiment. Finally honoring the legacy of Juneteenth, Texas became the first state to mark it as an official holiday. Yet it would take another forty-two years before the federal government officially acknowledged June 19th as a national holiday.
Recognition was largely sparked by the outcry of the Black Lives Matter Movement that arose after the world witnessed the violent death of George Floyd on Memorial Day 2020. Americans agreed, at least for a moment, that the nation should move closer to the tenets found in the Declaration of Independence, that “All Men are created equal.”
Thus on June 2021, Congress passed a resolution establishing Juneteenth as a federal holiday that was signed into law on June 17, 2021 by President Joseph Biden. This year, June 19, 2025, marks the 160th year since black folks learned that they were forever free. They paid for their liberty with their blood, toil, tears, scars, and pain.
Yet today, black folk and social justice-minded folk are faced with a new challenge ahead of this anniversary of true American Democracy. In less than five months in office, President Donald J. Trump and his administration have signed executive orders to roll back hard-fought inclusion measures for black folk that originally emerged with the ending of the Civil War.
Trump’s attacks on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion have some municipalities choosing to forego celebrating Juneteenth this year out of fear. There is fear of racial violence, but also of political backlash from the current administration.
Nonetheless, we celebrate. We—all Americans—celebrate Juneteenth as this is the day that marks the beginning of our inclusion in the American experiment. We should not be afraid to celebrate this inclusion, no matter the current or future political climate.
Why? Because from June 19, 1865 to June 19, 2025, black folk in America have continued to push this republic to fulfill its promise to become a democracy that represents a government of the people, by the people for the people, but most importantly, All The People! Yes, Juneteenth, or whatever day folk were freed in your region, should be commemorated because that was the day that America began marching closer to becoming “a more perfect union.” And this is why we celebrate Independence and Emancipation.
Reginald K. Ellis, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of History and African American Studies at Florida A&M University.
