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Friday, June 18, 2021

Juneteenth becomes 12th official U.S. holiday — and many workers get Friday off - The Mercury News

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With a signature just after 4 p.m. in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, President Joe Biden turned Friday into a federal holiday, celebrating Juneteenth, “a day of profound weight, of profound power” that has come to represent the end of slavery in the United States.

Nearly 3,000 miles away, San Francisco Mayor London Breed, the first Black woman to lead the city, rejoiced as Kamala Harris, the first Black vice president and a Bay Area native, witnessed the historic moment in the White House.

“America is taking a step forward not only in reckoning with our history of slavery,” Breed said in a tweet, “but celebrating the ongoing struggle for equality.”

Black Americans across the Bay Area and beyond have been celebrating Juneteenth for generations. But in the aftermath of a year marked by widespread protests against police brutality and renewed conversations about the lingering effects of slavery, the commemoration has swept into the lineup of official U.S. holidays with stunning bipartisan support.

For the first time since they created Martin Luther King Jr. Day nearly 40 years ago, a largely united Congress this week voted to make June 19 the newest and 12th federal holiday. And in some of the fastest government work in recent memory, many federal employees are expected to receive a paid day off Friday because the date falls on a Saturday this year. The U.S. didn’t observe MLK Jr. Day until three years after it was created.

It seems the creation of the holiday was too swift for some federal agencies to take the day off: A spokesperson for the postal service said post offices would be open and mail delivery would take place Friday and Saturday.

Locally, Santa Clara County recently became the first in the state to pass a resolution recognizing the holiday and giving county employees a paid day off. And major companies such as Twitter and Target have also moved in the last couple of years to recognize the holiday.

“It means a lot, but it also means caution and pause,” said Milan Balinton, executive director of the San Jose-based African American Community Service Agency, which has organized a range of events culminating in a celebration of freedom Saturday at the Santa Clara County Fairgrounds.

While Balinton is encouraged that more people are expressing an interest in learning about Black culture and finally “recognizing communities of color,” he is wary of companies throwing together events or launching self-serving marketing campaigns on the backs of Black people who have spent decades “in the trenches advocating.”

For more than a century, Black Americans have been commemorating June 19, the date in 1865 when enslaved African Americans in Galveston, Texas, were finally told they were free, more than two years after Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Also called “Freedom Day” and “Emancipation Day,” Juneteenth has been a day not only to celebrate but to reflect on and remember the horror of slavery and the struggles and triumphs of the Black community in the face of persistent racism.

Elizabeth Gessel, director of public programs at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, hopes the fact that Juneteenth has garnered the attention “of a whiter and wider public” will lead to more recognition and appreciation for the history and culture of Black Americans.

“I do think that people have kind of grasped onto it as this symbolic representation of, ‘Here’s the way that during this time of racial reckoning, we can acknowledge the history of slavery and that the end of slavery hasn’t been really paid attention to in the way that it should be,’ ” Gessel said.

The museum will mark the day with a range of events aimed at “putting Black joy forward,” Gessel said, including a program on the ways in which Black female musicians and guitarists have been largely erased from the history of rock ‘n’ roll.

“Proximity is important,” Gessel said. “The more you understand and know, the more you can relate to the people that you’re learning about.”

The wider recognition of Juneteenth comes after people flooded into streets and plazas across the country in the wake of the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and other Black Americans, fueling the Black Lives Matter movement’s push for racial justice.

Harris, who grew up in the East Bay, hailed the government’s recognition of Juneteenth as “an important statement” during Thursday’s signing ceremony at the White House marking June 19 a federal holiday. (When the date falls on a weekday, federal workers will receive time off then. When it does not, as is the case this year, they will receive the closest weekday off.)

“These are days when we as a nation have decided to stop and take stock and often to acknowledge our history,” the vice president said. “We must learn from our history and we must teach our children our history because it is part of our history as a nation. It is part of American history.”

While many lawmakers and activists championed the importance of Thursday’s events, others pointed out that the U.S. has a long way to go before African Americans have equal access to the same resources and opportunities afforded to White people. Speaking at the bill-signing ceremony, Biden acknowledged that Black people continue to face discrimination in day-to-day life, from real estate, finance, education, water quality and the criminal justice system to voting.

Juneteenth, Biden said, is a time to “celebrate the progress and grapple with the distance we’ve come and the distance we have to travel.”

“Great nations don’t ignore their most painful moments,” the president said, “they embrace them.”

The Link Lonk


June 18, 2021 at 05:36AM
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Juneteenth becomes 12th official U.S. holiday — and many workers get Friday off - The Mercury News

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