People participate in Juneteenth celebrations on Ball Avenue in Galveston, Texas, on Friday, June 19, 2026. (AP Photo/Lekan Oyekanmi) Millions of Americans celebrated Juneteenth on Friday, commemorating the arrival of federal troops in Galveston, Texas on June 19, 1865, with news that the Civil War was over and that the enslaved people of Texas were free.
Our newest federal holiday, signed into law by President Joe Biden in 2021, brought national recognition to Juneteenth celebrations that African American families and friends had been holding since the year after freedom came to Texas.
Although Juneteenth is first and foremost a celebration of freedom, it is also a timely reminder that freedom is threatened when self-serving people with power ignore the law.
Under President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, enslaved people in Texas and across the Confederacy were freed on Jan. 1, 1863. But with no one around to make local slaveholders and public officials comply, slavery continued in Texas until Major General Gordon Granger and thousands of Union troops — Black and white — arrived to enforce it.
In historical context, Juneteenth is also a reminder that progress is not irreversible. The freedom and promise of justice that were won at immense human cost in the Civil War flourished for only a decade during Reconstruction, before giving way to the appallingly misnamed “Redemption” movement.
The Compromise of 1877 led to the withdrawal of federal troops from across the South, leaving Black southerners vulnerable to the brutal violence and disenfranchisement that came with Jim Crow laws enforcing racial segregation and discrimination.
It wasn’t until 100 years after federal troops brought freedom to Texas that Congress passed and the president signed federal civil and voting rights laws. This moved us closer to the promise of a multiracial, multiethnic democracy grounded in the ideal of equality. It did not take another civil war, but it did require courage and sacrifice to overcome intense and often deadly resistance in former Confederate states.
In other words, for almost 200 of the 250 years of U.S. independence, the promises of the Declaration were denied to Black Americans. And now, at the very moment we are celebrating the declaration that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” that hard-won progress is being reversed.
The Voting Rights Act, one of the most important pieces of legislation in our country’s history, has been dismantled by right-wing Supreme Court justices and Republican legislators, justified with the insulting fiction that racism is no longer a problem — precisely at a time when overt racism is flourishing.
It is remarkable to consider that, just a few years ago, the law establishing Juneteenth was passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in the wake of George Floyd’s killing and the racial justice protests that followed. But even then, it wasn’t unanimous. One of the Republicans who didn’t go along was Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-Mont.), who made the ahistorical claim that the holiday was created by the left “out of whole cloth to celebrate identity politics” and “make Americans feel bad and convince them that our country is evil.”
He has company. MAGA pundit Eric Metaxas seems to hate Juneteenth. In 2024, he claimed that celebrating the holiday is “evil.” Last year, he called the holiday “a bitter, cynical, divisive, anti-American joke” that should be repealed.
MAGA political leaders are waging an aggressive effort to whitewash U.S. history through ideological purges of libraries, classrooms and museums. And that is happening alongside a multi-pronged attack by the administration, the ultra-conservative Supreme Court majority and Republican legislators on voting rights and fair elections. That includes Trump’s attempt to hijack the U.S. Postal Service to keep millions of people from voting by mail. And his effort to strong arm Congress to pass the anti-voting so-called SAVE Act.
These anti-democratic moves are a betrayal of American ideals and of Republicans’ own history.
Seventy years ago, a Republican president sent U.S. troops into Arkansas to protect Black students exercising their right to attend Central High School in Little Rock. This month, the Trump Justice Department sent 100 agents to harass employees and activists at an Ohio voter registration and civic engagement organization. Michael Waldman, president of the pro-democracy Brennan Center for Justice, called it “an egregious abuse of law enforcement for political ends.”
Given that MAGA political operatives decided to build power by manufacturing a panic around critical race theory and given that Trump’s Republican Party has declared war on diversity, equity and inclusion, it’s not terribly surprising that a 2023 poll found that most Republicans oppose the holiday and teaching its significance in schools. Trump’s executive orders against diversity, equity and inclusion have caused some funders to abandon community Juneteenth celebrations.
It is all so sad and unnecessary. The defeat of slavery and the advance of freedom should be celebrated by all Americans, not just Black people.
Advancing freedom and the cause of equality, in both the Civil War and Civil Rights eras, required the marshalling of great and diverse coalitions working together to advance the American promise. They achieved great victories at great cost.
That history is both truthful and hopeful. Americans should learn it and celebrate it — and defend it.
Svante Myrick is president of People For the American Way.
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