Juneteenth holiday still not official in Mississippi three years after federal recognition

Mississippi has the largest Black population in the country and had the largest population of freed slaves when the 13th Amendment was ratified in 1865. It is also one of 32 states that does not officially recognize the Juneteenth holiday after it became the newest established federal holiday since Martin Luther King, Jr. day in 1985. 

Juneteenth’s origins

The holiday originated in Galveston, Texas, when Union Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger and his troops arrived in the Gulf Coast city on June 19, 1865, more than two months after the collapse of the Confederacy’s secession campaign. 

There, still working under a plantation owner who refused to inform them of the fall of the Confederacy and the formal end of slavery, dozens of African Americans were informed by Granger and his troops that they had been freed months before. 

“The news of the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t make its way to Galveston because the enslavers didn’t want there to be freedom because there went their source of income,” said Olivia Williams, a museum educator at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. 

“So in 1865, people are hearing for the first time that they’re no longer property or in bondage. So June 19 represents that day of ‘finally, emancipation and freedom.’”

Slavery was permanently abolished six months later, when Georgia ratified the 13th Amendment. The following year, the freed people of Galveston started celebrating the occasion with speeches and picnics, which diffused as Black Texans moved throughout the country.

The fight to recognize Juneteenth in Mississippi

In Mississippi, the effort to have Juneteenth officially recognized as a state holiday has been a protracted one, according to House Minority leader Robert Johnson of Natchez, a nearly 30-year veteran of the state legislature.  

“We ask for a Juneteenth holiday and people just ignore it. So we spend the rest of the session trying to find ways to improve voting rights and economic development in places like the Delta,” said Johnson. “We have so many things we’re looking at and fighting for – Juneteenth is important, but they ignore it so we find ourselves working on things that are more acute that they also ignore.”

He says the House's Black and Democratic caucuses have worked for years to get the holiday officially recognized by the state, even while Mississippi continues to recognize Confederate Memorial Day, as well as the birthdays of General Robert E. Lee and Confederate President Jefferson Davis – political agents of the Confederacy who led the secession effort to maintain slavery as the economic engine of the south at the time.  

“This is a state that always talks about how important it is to know our true history, but they don’t want to know or teach all of it,” said Johnson.  

“Not only do we have the largest Black population in the country and a long, very embarrassing history of slavery, but we also have a pretty bad record historically when it concerns people’s civil rights and voting rights. This would be a great bridge to move us forward and away from that history we share in this state,” he said.

Getting a white majority behind a Black holiday

One of the largest impediments to official recognition, according to Johnson, remains political leadership in the majority-white, majority-Republican state legislature. 

“Just the white Republican leadership, and before that the white leadership period. There are no statewide Black elected officials or any running the Senate or House, and we don’t have a majority. So all we can do is ask, introduce and ask our fellow members that they recognize that day and they just refuse to even let it out of committee,” he said.

Mississippi, along with Arkansas, South Carolina and Florida in the south, do not officially commemorate the holiday. But dozens of other states have quickly established June 19 as official holidays since President Joseph R. Biden signed it into law in 2021. 

Even without official recognition, Williams values the importance the date holds in Black communities across Mississippi. 

“It really ties into the cultural aspect of Mississippi, especially Black Mississippians. It’s a few days where Black people get to really lean into who they are as a community and culture and just be who they are around people like them, and do things that celebrate blackness, liberation and emancipation,” she said.