On Thursday, the United States is celebrating Juneteenth, the country’s next public holiday, on June 19.
Following the passage of a measure by Congress in June 2021, then-President Joe Biden signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act into law, creating the holiday.
What is Juneteenth?
A combination of the terms “June” and “nineteenth,” Juneteenth celebrates the day in 1865 when the Union army informed over 25,000 Black slaves in the state of Texas that they were free.
Two and a half years had passed since President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which declared the legal freedom of slaves in Confederate states.
According to the National Museum of African American History and Culture, “emancipation became national policy” only after the US Constitution’s Thirteenth Amendment.
According to the amendment, “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction, except as a punishment for crime of which the party shall have been duly convicted.”
How is Juneteenth celebrated?
As stated on its Juneteenth webpage, the US National Park Service (NPS) said the holiday “continues to be celebrated in cities with Black populations through a series of parades, family reunions, speeches, and consumption of specific foods with a red color including barbeque, watermelon (an African fruit), and ‘red soda water’ (primarily strawberry soda).”
Red foods “are preferred because the color red symbolizes the blood previously shed by enslaved West Africans,” according to James Beard Award-winning food writer Adrian E. Miller, while the NPS notes that the use of red in ceremonies “is a practice that enslaved West Africans brought to the United States.”
