Editor’s Note: Peniel Joseph is the Barbara Jordan chair in ethics and political values and the founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a professor of history. He is the author of several books, most recently “The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.” The views expressed here are his. View more opinion articles on CNN.
Juneteenth, the annual commemoration of emancipation that has been celebrated in the African American community since June 19, 1865, should be a national federal holiday. On that day, in Galveston, Texas, a military officer informed African Americans that they had secured their freedom, more than two years after Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation declaring “all persons held as slaves” in the rebelling Confederate states to be free.
A national holiday commemorating Juneteenth would spur not only conversation about the origins of our current racial and political conflicts, but would also prompt vitally necessary education about white supremacy and its manifestations in policies and political actions that are anti-black, anti-democratic and anti-human.
In the African American community Juneteenth represents a sacred day of memory marked by millions of people annually participating in festivals, parades and other gatherings. National holidays serve as the ultimate reflection of the sacrifices of workers, soldiers and patriotic Americans who shed blood for democracy and gave of themselves for this republic. No group deserves this honor more than the generations of enslaved African Americans who were key to building the United States into the greatest superpower the world has ever known.
Commemorating Juneteenth as a national holiday would serve as an important reminder, no matter which political party occupied the White House or their political rhetoric, that racial slavery and the black Americans who helped end this system of bondage have been imprinted on the soul of this nation. We carry the active scars and unhealed wounds that are just beginning to be acknowledged and America must never forget how its enslaved African Americans and their descendants continue to shape its present and future.
National protests (and an international reckoning) in the wake of George Floyd’s public execution over two weeks ago have stimulated perhaps the most vibrant, widespread and momentous political mobilization for racial justice in American history, which has produced a series of shocking responses from the White House – from plans for open military repression to deafening silence.
Donald J. Trump’s words and actions during these protests, punctuated by his initial decision to hold his first political rally since the Covid-19 pandemic on June 19 in Tulsa, Oklahoma—sacred ground where over 300 black people were massacred by racist white mobs in 1921—announced him to many Americans as the official President of the Second Confederacy. Despite White House denials of the symbolism behind Trump’s plans, the symbolism was painfully clear. Late Friday, Trump announced on Twitter that the rally was rescheduled for the following day, June 20 “out of respect”—but still to be held in Tulsa.
Let’s consider the concept of “respect.” Donald Trump’s public opposition to removing the names of Confederate generals from army bases dishonors our nation but also clearly reveals where his own loyalties lie. “America First,” the slogan that helped win him the presidency (and which has its own shameful history beyond his use of it) should be more accurately updated to convey Trump’s current efforts to re-establish a white supremacist republic.
In many ways, America is still as racially divided now as it was on the eve of the Civil War. That conflict revolved around a bloody struggle between pro-slavery forces and abolitionists. While the North won the war, Southerners won the peace by innovating racial terror upon black communities physically and through policies that criminalized, segregated, impoverished and punished African Americans for being audacious enough to successfully fight for their own liberation.
Reconstruction offered America its first opportunity to create an interracial democracy. As a nation the United States failed this test – although millions of newly freed black women and men still created black schools, churches, businesses, towns, settlements and a culture determined to reimagine democracy against long odds.
This is what makes Tulsa an especially poignant site at this moment in history where ghosts from its racist past are confronting the nation. The 1921 racial massacre of Tulsa’s thriving black Greenwood section—dubbed a “black Wall Street” by locals—proved to be part of a mean season of white supremacist violence that touched major cities and small towns in the early decades of the early 20th century. What white-owned newspapers called “riots” were often actually anti-black racial pogroms wherein whites attacked black neighborhoods, burned down black businesses, and slaughtered black Americans on the pretext of some insult, violation of racial etiquette or other malicious lie.
The same whites who orchestrated this massacre then covered it up, burying bodies and burning evidence of this atrocity in hopes of relegating this tragedy to history’s dustbin. Tulsa had the highest death toll among a series of racial massacres that occurred between 1906 and 1923 and included white supremacist violence in Atlanta, St. Louis, Elaine, Arkansas, Chicago and Rosewood, Florida.
The rise of the Ku Klux Klan as a force in American politics during the 1920s accompanied this surge in racial violence – as did white fears that black economic success might infringe on privileges and entitlements thought to have been forever lost after the Civil War, but reclaimed through the combined might of racist brutality and the complicity of elected officials in and outside of the South.
White fear is today exactly what Trump is hoping to turn to his political advantage. The combined effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, resulting mass unemployment and the growing call for racial justice have, once again, further unleashed Janus-faced political forces rooted in America’s original sin.
On one side, as the world has witnessed since May 26, millions of Americans are protesting and demonstrating for institutions and policies to empower black dignity and citizenship, to put an end to white supremacy and realize the full measure of progress and reform instigated during Reconstruction and the civil rights movement.
On the other side is a cohort of Americans, led by the President, who will not let the “Lost Cause” die. They are united in what can only be deemed an unapologetically racist belief that full black citizenship requires an unacceptable loss of white power, prestige and privilege.
Trump’s decision to stage a MAGA rally in Tulsa is about more than just trolling his political enemies – just as his supposed flirtation with white nationalists, whom he recruited into the White House and made key political advisers, proved to more than just symbolic. He has positioned himself as the ideological successor to Jefferson Davis, working to disunite the union and preside over a thriving economy built on the backs of black labor and the lie of white supremacy.
Trump’s plan to appear in Tulsa is the act of not only a racial demagogue, but also a leader who seems intent on promoting violence – a theme his past speeches to law enforcement have repeatedly invoked. With his tacit, and sometimes explicit, embrace of xenophobia, racism and vitriol against Americans who oppose his views, Trump has proved himself perhaps the biggest threat to American democracy since Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, two white supremacist traitors to democracy who have, until the last few weeks, largely been lionized rather than treated as the war criminals they in fact were.
In America, for both good and ill, symbolism matters. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s successful effort to fuse civil rights struggles with founding precepts of American democracy worked political miracles for a time: for instance, President John F. Kennedy subsequently acknowledged black citizenship as a moral issue. President Lyndon Johnson went further, comparing peaceful black protesters in Selma, Alabama, to the patriots who fought iconic battles in Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, during the American Revolution.
The powerful symbolism of making Juneteenth a national holiday is what America needs right now. Juneteenth honors America’s past racial justice victories even while acknowledging our bitter defeats. Suddenly, struggles for racial justice, black dignity and human rights that have faced huge setbacks in the age of Trump appear within reach, powered by Black Lives Matter demonstrations that have featured an unprecedentedly multiracial array of protesters in the streets.
A Juneteenth national holiday might offer us as well the necessary space as a country to investigate our racial past without recriminations and discover solidarity going forward. It could also prevent us from repeating the generational cycle of fleeting racial progress marked by a resurgence of racial violence and terror.
This spring of racial hope of the last few weeks offers us our third major chance, after Reconstruction and the civil rights movement, to end institutional racism, defeat white supremacy, secure black citizenship and achieve our country as it should be. We have a generational opportunity in front of us to finally build the Beloved Community King sought in his own lifetime. An important sign on this score, both symbolic and substantive, would be making Juneteenth an annual marker of pride rather than shame.