Cuyahoga County Executive Armond Budish has a laudable idea in his proposal to add Juneteenth as a paid holiday for Cuyahoga County employees. The proposal went to Cuyahoga County Council yesterday.
Budish is on less solid footing in proposing that the county do this by expanding the number of paid holidays to 12 per year, from the current 11. Even the federal government is less generous -- with 10 regular paid holidays per year, and an 11th day off every four years for Inauguration Day.
Cuyahoga County Council should keep the county’s paid holidays to 11 per year by swapping Juneteenth for another day -- ideally, the day after Thanksgiving, which is now a bonus paid day off for county workers, but not for most working Americans. That bonus day is also the reason federal employees currently have fewer days off, except in presidential inaugural years, than Cuyahoga County employees.
Why is a Juneteenth holiday important? It isn’t the day slavery ended, it isn’t the day the Civil War ended, it isn’t the day the vicious civil rights impediments of Jim Crow ended, but it is a day, symbolically, to celebrate all those things -- and to look toward a future day when systemic racism is conquered, too.
Juneteenth marks June 19, 1865, the day, more than two months after the Confederate surrender, when Union Army Gen. Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, to take command of 2,000 federal forces there. They were charged with enforcing the Emancipation Proclamation issued nearly two and a half years earlier, and with ensuring both the freeing of slaves in Galveston and the nullifying of Confederate laws there. On that same day, federal forces marched through town proclaiming that all slaves were free and that their freedom would be enforced.
In Texas, it’s rightly been a state holiday since 1980, but it’s not just a holiday for Texas. It’s a day symbolically when the nation’s will and the results of four years of bloody combat were enforced to end the institution of slavery on U.S. shores -- through enforcement of the law, not just through proclamation and war.
It is true that slavery didn’t end everywhere on June 19, 1865, and that it continued legally in states like Kentucky until the 13th Amendment entered into force on Dec. 18, 1865. But Juneteenth has endured and grown in stature as a day to celebrate this watershed time in U.S. history when the force of arms, national will and federal law united to end slavery.
Last year, the governors of Virginia, New York and New Jersey proclaimed it a state holiday. Cuyahoga County should do the same -- and can do so, while keeping its paid holidays at 11, by eliminating the bonus day after Thanksgiving.
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The Link LonkApril 14, 2021 at 04:56PM
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Cuyahoga County should add Juneteenth as a paid holiday but keep to 11 paid days off: editorial - cleveland.com
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