Juneteenth, Celebrations, Racial Backlash and Ongoing and Sinister Attacks From The Far Right!
Here we are. Another year, another June and the nation is about to celebrate another Juneteenth holiday.
On June 17, 2021, President Biden signed the bill into law, making Juneteenth the 11th holiday recognized by the federal government. At a White House ceremony, Mr. Biden singled out Opal Lee, an activist who at the age of 89 walked from her home in Fort Worth to Washington, D.C., and called her “a grandmother of the movement to make Juneteenth a federal holiday.”
On June 19, 1865, about two months after the Confederate general Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox, Va., Gordon Granger, a Union general, arrived in Galveston, Texas, to inform enslaved African Americans of their freedom and that the Civil War had ended. General Granger’s announcement put into effect the Emancipation Proclamation, which had been issued nearly more than two and a half years earlier, on Jan. 1, 1863, by President Abraham Lincoln.
As is the case with Black History Month and other events, associated with people of African descent, we are rightly introduced to and reminded of the innumerable contributions Black people have made to this nation. Corporations make bold and brazen acknowledgments, various institutions and churches salute Black history, sponsor…
