Biden Reflects On Making Juneteenth A Federal Holiday During Visit To Historic Galveston Church

Biden's act of making Juneteenth a federal holiday marked the first federal holiday established since Ronald Reagan made Martin Luther King Jr Day a holiday in 1983.

During a Juneteenth commemoration at Galveston’s historic Reedy Chapel AME Church, former President Joe Biden took the opportunity to call for Americans to unite during uncertain times, and Biden also noted that he was still very proud of his decision to sign bipartisan legislation to make Juneteenth an official federal holiday.

“I don’t come here today to only commemorate the past. I come here because we know the good Lord isn’t done with us yet. We have work to do. We need to keep pushing America forward. We’re the United States of America,” Biden said in his remarks. “There’s nothing, nothing beyond our capacity when we act together.”

According to CNN, Biden’s act of making Juneteenth a federal holiday marks the first federal holiday established since Ronald Reagan made Martin Luther King Jr Day a holiday in 1983.

Biden continued, “Juneteenth is a day of liberation, a day of remembrance, and a day of celebration. Juneteenth represents both the long and hard night of slavery and subjugation and the promise of joyful morning to come. Our federal holidays say…who we are as Americans. What we celebrate says what we value.”

Juneteenth, deeply rooted in Galveston, Texas, history, marks the day in 1865 when Union Gen. Gordon Granger arrived with U.S. troops to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation and bring freedom to the last enslaved people in the Confederacy.

Indeed, as David Wright Faladé, a University of Illinois professor and the author of the Civil War novel “Black Cloud Rising,” noted in an op-ed for The Chicago Tribune, the narrative that Black people in Texas did not know they were freed is a mishandling of history.

“To characterize Juneteenth as the moment African Americans only first ‘learned’ of their emancipation risks perpetuating the false idea, broadly believed during slavery and recently resuscitated through efforts to ban books and scrub curricula, that they were merely victims, benighted and lesser, incapable of significant action for themselves,” Wright Faladé wrote.