Juneteenth isn’t just a Black holiday. It’s for all Americans

JUNE 19, 2024 7:00 AM ET
By Michel Martin, Suzanne Nuyen

Why Juneteenth is for all Americans



Opal Lee, shown earlier this month, is celebrating this week's passage of legislation making Juneteenth a federal holiday. President Biden signed the bill Thursday.
Amanda McCoy/Fort Worth Star-Telegram/Tribune News Service via Getty Images [from 2021]

This essay was written by Michel Martin, Morning Edition and Up First host

Confession: I had never heard of Juneteenth until I came to D.C., after college. A colleague and friend who was dating a guy from Texas told me about it. Even then, I thought it was a regional thing, like Mardi Gras — which is to say: not to be tampered with, watered down or interpreted by people not in the know, if you get my drift.

You can see it. It commemorates the day federal troops arrived to enforce The Emancipation Proclamation in Texas some two years after it was issued. More broadly, though, it celebrates the end of chattel slavery. To my mind, it celebrates the beginning of true freedom because — as moral philosophers have long known — no one is free until everyone is because oppression ensnares the oppressor as well as the oppressed. Anyone who has ever been in a toxic relationship knows that.

That is one reason the magnificent Opal Lee, the Fort Worth native known as the grandmother of Juneteenth, worked so hard and so long to see Juneteenth become a federal holiday. A white mob burned down her family home in 1939. She became an educator and an activist and saw the day become a federal holiday last year. She told her local station KTVT “It's not a Texas thing or a Black thing. It's an American thing."

Go celebrate.