U.S To Celebrate 'Freedom From Slavery' With A New National Holiday- Juneteenth

On Thursday(Jun 17), President Joe Biden signed a bill marking Juneteenth National Independence Day at the federal level.

The presidential approval comes as a culmination of a renewed demand to recognize Juneteenth following the 'Black Lives Matter' demonstrations that engulfed the country in protest against the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

“Great nations don’t ignore their most painful moments,” Biden said before signing the bill. “They don’t ignore those moments in the past. They embrace them. Great nations don’t walk away. We come to terms with the mistakes we made.”

During a federal holiday, non-essential services remain closed, and government employees will get paid holiday.

Juneteenth (a portmanteau of “June” and “19th”) is the 11th annual federal holiday and the first one to be established since Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 1983. It commemorates the Union Army declaration of the end of slavery in Texas on June 19, 1865. The declaration came more than two years after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in the midst of the Civil War.

On Jun 14, the U.S Congress voted to make Juneteenth a federal holiday , one day after the Senate unanimously approved the measure. 14 Republican representatives opposed the move in Congress.

Paul Gosar, a Republican congressman from Arizona who voted against the bill Mr Biden signed this week, called Juneteenth “more debunked Critical Race Theory” and claimed it was “tear[ing] us apart”.

“Let’s call an ace an ace. This is an effort by the Left to create a day out of whole cloth to celebrate identity politics as part of its larger efforts to make Critical Race Theory the reigning ideology of our country,” Rosendale said in a statement.