Bill Passes Making Juneteenth a National Holiday

On Thursday, June 17, 2021, President Joe Biden signed a law declaring Juneteenth a national holiday.

Juneteenth, which has been celebrated by Black Americans for generations, commemorates June 19, 1865, when Union soldiers brought the news of freedom to enslaved Black people in Galveston, Texas. That was two months after the Confederacy had surrendered and about 2 1/2 years after the Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves in Southern states.

Juneteenth, or June 19, is the 12th federal holiday, and the first new federal holiday since Martin Luther King Jr. Day was created in 1983. The formal name is Juneteenth National Independence Day. The bill was passed unanimously in the Senate and then on a vote of 415-14 in the House.

The White House invited a bipartisan and racially diverse group of VIPs for the bill signing, among them 94-year-old Opal Lee, a Fort Worth civil rights icon known as the grandmother of Juneteenth who drew attention to the cause in 2016 by walking from Fort Worth to Washington.

Sen. Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican, had single-handedly blocked the proposed holiday, arguing that the federal budget couldn’t take the strain of another paid day off for workers. He abruptly dropped his objection on Tuesday and within hours, the Senate unanimously approved the bill, followed Wednesday by the House in a 415-14 vote.

The breakthrough came after an impassioned push by Opal Lee. Sen. John Cornyn and Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee led the bipartisan push to declare Juneteenth a national holiday.