Juneteenth is not a recent invention. It was born June 19, 1865, in Galveston, Texas, when Union Major General Gordon Granger read General Order No. 3: “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.” More than two and a half years had passed since Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Texas’s 250,000 enslaved people were the last to be told.
The freed people of Texas began celebrating that date the very next year. Barred from public parks in some cities, they pooled their money and bought land. They called those places Emancipation Park. Texas made June 19 a state holiday in 1980. Congress made it a federal holiday in 2021, unanimously in the Senate. It is not “woke.” It predates any political agenda by more than a century. The contributions of Black Americans to this nation are foundational and immeasurable – including the music we think of as quintessentially American. Blues, jazz, gospel, rock ’n’ roll all trace their roots to African musical traditions, carried through the Middle Passage and transformed into an art form that changed the world.
And yet the Trump administration has shown nothing but contempt for Black history, Black heroes and Black Americans themselves. The list should be named: Donald Trump removed Juneteenth and MLK Day from National Park Service free entry days, replacing them with his own birthday. He restored Confederate monuments – built not to honor the dead but to intimidate the living, erected during Jim Crow and the Civil Rights era as symbols of white resistance to Black equality – and reinstated Confederate names to military bases that Congress had just renamed. He ordered removal of exhibits depicting slavery from Independence Hall and Fort Pulaski. The Defense Intelligence Agency paused observances of Juneteenth, Black History Month and Holocaust Remembrance Day. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared “identity months dead.”
A year ago, we wrote about Trump’s executive order directing park staff members to post signs soliciting visitor reports of “negative” historical information – at Mesa Verde, Amache and the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site (Herald, June 18, 2025). OnJune 12, U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley ordered the administration to restore all removed content, writing that it had tried “to rewrite the Nation’s history with a white-out pen.”
Then there is the vote. In April, the Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling in “Louisiana v. Callais” gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Republican-controlled Southern states have rushed to eliminate districts held by Black Democrats – even as Black Americans account for much of those states’ population growth. The push could erase as many as six Congressional Black Caucus seats, the largest loss since Reconstruction. It is the successor to poll taxes and literacy tests. Taxation without representation is not a relic of 1776. It is happening now.
On Sunday, UFC fighter Josh Hokit, competing on the White House lawn at an 80th birthday celebration for the president, ended his post-fight interview shouting, “Michelle Obama is a man. Am I right, America?” Trump smirked. The White House, when asked to denounce the remark, praised the fighter’s performance.
Michelle Obama responded by posting a video of herself and Barack with artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby, previewing the portrait for the Obama Presidential Center. No engagement with the slur. Just her own words, lived: “When they go low, we go high.”
Juneteenth was never given. It was claimed – by people barred from public parks who bought their own land, who kept this holiday alive through Reconstruction, Jim Crow and decades when most of white America had never heard of it.
“I think everyone should be celebrating,” says Tracy Jones of the Southwest Movement 4 Black Lives. “Because it is American history – it’s the history of our country.”
The Southwest Movement 4 Black Lives hosts Durango’s Juneteenth celebration today, Friday, June 19, from 4:30 to 7:30 p.m. at Buckley Park. Everyone is welcome.
Come. Because Juneteenth was never just a day. It was a declaration. And that work is never done.
