This year, it is more important than ever to celebrate Juneteenth.

In 2021, when President Joe Biden signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act into law, only about a third of Americans knew what the holiday was. That share has more than doubled.

While the explanation is fairly simple, the deeper meaning bears reflection.

The name, from the 19th Century, is a portmanteau of “June” and “nineteenth,” celebrated on June 19. It refers to that day in 1865 when Major General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas to order the final enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation, which President Abraham Lincoln had issued nearly two-and-a-half years before.

There had been few Union troops in Texas, the most remote state of the former Confederacy, to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation after the war.

More than two months after the surrender at Appomattox Court House, ending the Civil War, Granger and his troops posted General Order Number 3 in Galveston:

“The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor.

“The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.”

A quarter-million enslaved people lived in Texas at the time, many of them brought by easterners fleeing the war. While there was jubilation at the announcement, enforcement took time. Granger had two-thousand soldiers at his command but Texas has a sprawling landscape.

There was no way to guarantee that the freed slaves who remained quietly in their present homes, as the order advised, would actually be paid wages.

The next year, in 1866, a Jubilee Day was organized in Texas for June 19, which grew and spread to other states. In the Jim Crow era, Juneteenth celebrations declined.

Sheila Jackson Lee, a Texas Congresswoman, was the author and lead sponsor of the legislation that in 2021 established Juneteenth as a federal holiday.

Born in Queens, she was a student at Jamaica High School when the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, altering her life’s course. According to her 2024 obituary in The New York Times, it filled her with a new fire: If Dr. King had died trying to create opportunities for people like her, shouldn’t she reach as high as she could?

“I am a benefactor of the hills and valleys, the broken bodies and broken hearts, the loss of life of many who have gone on before me,” she said.

Of establishing Juneteenth as a federal holiday, she said, “I thought it was extremely important to pass a federal holiday that would give America a moment to be able to reflect not just on the jubilation of freedom, but also the brutality of slavery and what it meant to human beings.”

Now is a good time to reflect on just that as the current federal administration seems bent on whitewashing United States history, pretending that brutality against the Black race did not exist.

Juneteenth was created as a federal holiday soon after the May 25, 2020 murder of George Floyd at the hands of a white police officer, which galvanized much of the nation in a racial reckoning.

We talked at that time to Anne Pope, then the director of the northeast region of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, who compared the protests following Floyd’s murder to the Civil  Rights marches in the 1960s.

“Our work was almost in vain because it has been very hard to point at something that has made a difference,” Pope said of the Civil Rights movement over a half-century before. “Not that many things had changed since we’d all been protesting and speaking out.”

Pope, in her eighties, said, for her, the Black Lives Matter movement “just feels so good because for years we have talked about it. We’ve talked about injustices, we’ve had conferences on it, we’ve certainly set up community meetings around it. When something happens, we protest it for a while, and nothing changes …

“We’re all tired of seeing a young Black man get shot and killed by the police and nothing happens … We’re going to see some moves now that are going to make a difference. We have young people who we certainly want to see grow up and not have to be afraid of white people or the police.

“It is time now that we get some real change,” she said.

But, sadly, what happened after that awakening has been a backlash as the current federal administration has launched a war on diversity, equity, and inclusion and is attempting to erase our history — the brutality of slavery, the difficult and ongoing work to gain equal rights, and even the accomplishments and vital contributions made by Black Americans.

The Park Service, for example, removed Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad from its webpage as well as softening references to slavery, racial division, the civil rights struggle, and the Jim Crow era. The Pentagon deleted, among others, baseball legend Jackie Robinson’s military service, the Tuskegee airmen, and Medal of Honor recipient Charles Calvin Rogers.

The fort in Louisiana that was in 2023 — under a renaming process ordered by Congress to end the honoring of Confederate leaders — named for Albany’s Sergeant William Henry Johnson is having his name removed.

Johnson was a Black soldier posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for single-handedly fighting off about two dozen Germans during World War I, killing at least four.

“We are also going to be restoring the names to Fort Pickett, Fort Hood, Fort Gordon, Fort Rucker, Fort Polk, Fort A.P. Hill, and Fort Robert E. Lee,” President Donald Trump announced on Tuesday.

The Louisiana fort had originally been named for Confederate General Leonidas Polk and will now, as with name switches at other forts, have the name of a service member with the same last name as the original Confederate honoree: General James H. Polk, a World War II officer who later commanded U.S. Army Europe.

So not only is the honor bestowed on a heroic Black soldier being erased but, at the same time, the Confederacy, which fought to preserve slavery, is being honored.

Locally, we reported in April on Albany’s Underground Railroad Education Center, which had its federal grant cut, without cause, for a program meant to democratize the museum field.

We’ve long admired the center, which preserves the local and national history of the Underground Railroad movement and its legacy to today’s social-justice issues.

Mary Liz Stewart, who founded the center with her husband, Paul, in the 1990s, said the idea for the museum project came when she was looking for quotes by Black Americans for a newsletter the center regularly puts out.

She came across this one by Shirley Chisolm, the first Black woman elected to Congress: “If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring in a folding chair.”

Stewart said she realized “museum stories now are very one-sided … We need to take a proactive step to change that.”

The grant was intended to fund a program that would give high school students hands-on learning experiences in museums to prepare them for a career in the field.

 “Some days,” Mary Liz Stewart said in April, “I turn to Paul and say, ‘It feels like the Federal Fugitive Slave Law and bounty hunters again.’”

When we asked Anne Pope, as our nation seemed on the cusp of real progress toward equality, what she’d like to see from white people who sympathize with the movement, she pointed to education, both intimately and systematically.

“I think that white families can begin to teach their children that we are people,” said Pope, who lives in Albany. “We are human beings. We are not someone to be laughed at or poked fun at because our skin color is different. That we’re all one; God made all of us and we’re all the same. And that we’ll be stronger if we support each other.

“Respect is very important,” Pope continued, “so our young people don’t need to go to school and be made fun of, or have teachers hold them back or not encourage them. We have some bright people in our race. Some of the brightest. But because they’ve been beaten down so much, they don’t know that, and I think we’re tired of that. I know I’m tired of it … I hope Black people can see the power in their presence.” 

The promise made by General Order Number 3 in 1865 was more progressive than the Emancipation Proclamation that came before it and more progressive than the 13th Amendment that followed it.

Its promise of “absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property” has yet to be fulfilled. The words are noble but, just as in 1865, when there was no way to guarantee the contract would be enforced, such is currently the case.

All of us, of every race, have to be aware of our nation’s history — the good as well as the bad. I am a white person and I am celebrating this year’s Juneteenth by writing this editorial.

When we asked Anne Pope what white people, allies of the movement for racial equality, should do, she said, “I think that white people who sit out somewhere — and they’re the ones, I’m sure, who talk about the violence and whatever — they have to search their souls and answer, ‘What have I done to answer the calls of justice and equality?’ They can no longer just sit and think, ‘Oh, look over there at that group of people. We feel so sorry for them.’ What have you done to make things better?”

That is a question each of us should ask ourselves: What have I done to make things better?

Write us with your answers; maybe we’ll start a movement.

Because Sheila Jackson Lee, in promoting Juneteenth, said it should be used as a time to reflect on the jubilation of freedom as well as the brutality of slavery, we’re going to close with a quotation from Afro-Latina writer Veronica Chambers.

The Young Abolitionists used these words in their 2023 Juneteenth celebration at the Underground Railroad Education Center in Albany, once the home of Black abolitionists Harriet and Stephen Myers.

“Freedom is in the claiming,” Chambers wrote. “The elemental sermon embedded into the history and lore of Juneteenth has always been one of hope.

“The gifts of the holiday are the moments of connection, renewal and joy for a people who have had to endure so much, for so long. To me, Juneteenth matters because it says: Keep going, the future you want is coming.”