The Juneteenth commemoration marks the legal end of slavery in the United States, a hard-fought achievement of the Civil War. Granger’s announcement in 1865 put into effect the Emancipation Proclamation, which had been issued more than 2 1/2 years earlier by President Abraham Lincoln, on Jan. 1, 1863.
The holiday is also called “Juneteenth Independence Day,” “Freedom Day” or “Emancipation Day.”
The proclamations issued across the country are “just largely symbolic,” said Mark Anthony Neal, a professor of African American studies at Duke University.
“If you really want to put skin in the game, you make it a paid holiday,” he said. Such actions show state employees, he added, that “‘this is a sacrifice on our part.’”
It also forces a recognition that Juneteenth is a day that should be commemorated by all Americans, not just Black citizens, Neal said.
“You think of Juneteenth and Independence Day as kind of bookends to this idea of American democracy and freedom,” he said.
Texas became the first state in the country to make Juneteenth a paid day off in 1980.
When Biden signed the holiday into federal law on June 17, 2021, eight other states had already made it a paid holiday.
They included New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Virginia, Delaware, Illinois, Louisiana, and Massachusetts.
This year, nine more states joined them: Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Maine, Maryland, Nebraska, Oregon, South Dakota, and Washington, according to the Congressional Research Service.
In Connecticut, it took more than two years for legislators to enact a bill creating the holiday, said Nolan, who recalled some of the impassioned arguments he and others made on the floor of the Statehouse.
“I said, ‘People are going to be watching,’” he said. “‘People are going to know that you didn’t vote for this.’”
The legislation was approved 148-1 in the state’s House of Representatives and 35-1 in the Senate.
Article Appeared @https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/06/18/nation/juneteenth-is-federal-holiday-most-states-its-still-not-day-off/