When I was growing up, my mom would never miss the Roxbury Homecoming celebration. Even as she got older, we would stake out a spot the night before and return the next day and set up our cooler, food and chairs for the community picnic that’s been taking place in Franklin Park for decades.
We as a family would spend the day with a few thousand of Boston’s extended Black community, including those who came back to Boston to meet up with their relatives and friends to catch up on the news they missed in the prior year.
So, imagine my surprise when I learned that the Roxbury Homecoming I had been going to all these years is the city’s Juneteenth celebration. Well, before I learned about Juneteenth a decade ago, I was still celebrating Black people’s freedom. Four years ago, when June 19 was made a national holiday, my mom was so proud that finally the whole nation gets to enjoy the love of family, friends and freedom the day represents.
It only took three days in 2021 for the federal government to make Juneteenth a national holiday. No controversy to speak of surrounded the legislation.
On a Tuesday the Senate approved the bill sponsored by Massachusetts’ own Ed Markey on a voice vote. The next day, the House passed and sent the bill to President Joe Biden, 415-14, with all Democrats and 195 Republicans voting in favor. Just 14 Republicans were opposed. On the third day, June 17, Biden signed the bill into law making June 19 a “legal public holiday.”
Many pieces of legislation that pass through Congress are so complex, replete with legalese and oblique references to existing statues, that lawmakers rely on plain language summaries to understand what they’re voting on. Most don’t read such bills, and few would understand them if they did without consulting a stack of law books, taking instead a shortcut that shocks some voters but shouldn’t.
Not so with the Markey’s Juneteenth bill, all four paragraphs of it. All it does is add “Juneteenth National Independence Day” after Memorial Day in the calendar of federal holidays. Nowhere in the sparse text do the words “diversity, equity and inclusion” appear, either singly or lumped together as they often are these days. Nor are they abbreviated as “DEI,” which President Trump and his Republican toadies have turned into a racial code word even though the admittedly vague workplace practices apply to white women and to LGBTQ+ and disabled workers and religious minorities not of color.
Every member of Congress understood what the Juneteenth bill did. But somehow four years later there are corporations that have mistaken the newest national holiday and its promotion as a DEI initiative. Those companies might want to have the in-house counsel look up Public Law 117-17 and distribute copies to their C-suites.
In a partial national roundup, the Associated Press reported that some corporate sponsors and local governments have withdrawn their financial support for local celebrations of Juneteenth this year. The wire service noted the example of the Southern Colorado Juneteenth Festival in Colorado Springs, where dozens of companies ended their support for the holiday event. “They have said their budgets have been cut because of DEI,” said Jennifer Smith, a festival planner.
The governor’s office in West Virginia, the AP reported, cited a budget deficit as the reason for the state government not hosting any Juneteenth events this year for the first time since 2017. Or was it because Republican Governor Patrick Morrisey just last month signed a bill to end all diversity programs?
In Scottsdale, Ariz., the city council dissolved the government’s DEI office in February, directly leading to the annual Juneteenth festival being cancelled.
Such companies and governments need to understand what the Juneteenth holiday is. It is a celebration of the closure of an extended, sordid chapter in the nation’s history. It marks the day in 1865 when a Union general in Galveston, Texas, issued an order affirming the end of enslavement of Black people in the state, in keeping with the Emancipation Proclamation promulgated two and a half years earlier.
Some Black critics scoff at the celebration of the long delay in freedom coming, but few Union troops were present in Texas, which lacked strategic military objectives, to enforce the proclamation or spread word of it. Enslaved people were unable to find out on their own because they were not allowed to learn how to read, and their enslavers surely had no interest in informing them.
Even after Major General Gordon Granger issued the order, some enslavers held people in bondage until the cotton crop was harvested in October and others gunned down some who left in search of freedom off the plantation, according to an oral history collected in the 1930s by the federal Works Progress Administration.
Juneteenth is not only Black history. The holiday marks the entire country’s history. The end of enslavement affected the labor market, economic growth, population distribution and government in the South.
For companies, the Juneteenth holiday is an opportunity to promote their brand in furtherance of marketing their goods and services, just as many do in other holiday seasons. Corporate sponsors who withdrew their support risk a Black consumer boycott — if only their names were known. Juneteenth event organizers appear hesitant to identify former sponsors, perhaps hoping they may return to the fold in the future. Diligent local activists should determine their names and disclose them at the very least, the first step in applying public pressure.
As for state and local governments, Juneteenth is an occasion, like other holidays, to bring constituents together to acknowledge and celebrate, in this case, a common history. The holiday celebrations can help heal the country’s fractured civic life and politics.
In neither the corporate world nor government is the Juneteenth holiday a DEI initiative. For leaders who don’t understand that fact, here’s some advice, apt in this case: Go read the bill. It only takes a minute or two.
Ronald Mitchell
Editor and Publisher, Bay State Banner
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.