OPINION: January 1 or December 6, Not June 19, Should Be the National Holiday

Today has been declared a national holiday—Juneteenth. But if we really want to celebrate a day that was a landmark in America’s journey toward a freer, less racist society, we should not be celebrating Juneteenth—we should be celebrating January 1, the day in 1863 when the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, or December 6, the day the 13th Amendment was ratified. Or even February 3, the day the 15th Amendment was ratified in 1870. And I believe the only reason the Democrats wanted this holiday is because it marks the date of a rare instance of a Democrat politician (Andrew Johnson, who was otherwise very racist) allowing an anti-slavery action. Indeed, the president in office when Juneteenth happened, Johnson, infamously wrote, “This is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men.”

The Emancipation Proclamation was written and issued by Republican President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, and it freed all the slaves in Confederate territory and welcomed black soldiers into the US Army and Navy. The 13th Amendment abolished slavery. And the 15th Amendment ensured voting rights to black Americans, as they originally had when the Constitution was first ratified.

June 19 saw no pivotal point in the history of race relations in America. It “marks the day when federal troops arrived in Galveston, Texas in 1865 to take control of the state and ensure that all enslaved people be freed.” I am very happy that the federal troops were ensuring that the last territory not continue to hold people in bondage. 

But the reality is that this day was merely the end point of a work that was started by other men, years before. Furthermore, the president at the time, as noted above, was overall a raging racist, not a civil rights champion. 

I am all for having a national holiday to celebrate an important event in American history furthering the end of racism—but let it celebrate Lincoln, the president who called a black man his friend, not the president who believed blacks incapable of engaging in anything but “barbarism.”