Juneteenth: From local celebration to federal holiday

2016

By the start of the 21st century, most states observed Juneteenth in some way. However, the observance was still not an official federal holiday.

A major factor in spearheading the movement to make Juneteenth a national holiday was Opal Lee, a Texas native who, at the age of 89 in 2016, began a walking campaign to raise awareness of the effort.

Lee walked to different areas of the country, spanning from Texas to Washington, D.C., covering 2.5 miles at a time. This was meant to symbolize the roughly 2.5 years between the enactment of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, and the proclamation of freedom for Texas slaves on June 19, 1865.

Lee garnered widespread support for making Juneteenth a federal holiday, at one point delivering approximately 1.5 million signatures to Congress in support of the effort.

“People just think of Juneteenth as a festival and as a Texas thing. Unity, freedom is what Juneteenth is all about,” she later told Oprah Daily. “Let’s celebrate freedom from the 19th of June to the Fourth of July, because we weren’t all free in 1776.”