Republicans should embrace and celebrate Juneteenth. It’s a holiday that celebrates the first great achievements of the Republican Party: preserving the Union and liberating the slaves. It is time to recognize the emancipation of former slaves as a day of universal rejoicing and soberness as we contemplate the terrible price our nation has paid for the original sin of slavery. Juneteenth, celebrated on the 19th of June, is a perfect opportunity for that recognition.
Embrace Juneteenth As a National Holiday
Juneteenth has been an unofficial holiday in the African-American community for over 150 years. It commemorates the June 1865 official notification in Texas that the slaves had been freed two years earlier. Although celebrated initially only in Texas in 1866, the holiday spread to the rest of Black America over the following years. It was not widely recognized by the rest of America, however, until 2020, when Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) introduced a bill to create the new holiday. It is fitting that a Texas Republican introduced the legislation. It was fitting that a Republican president, Donald Trump, first made Juneteenth a holiday by executive order before the bill became law.
Democrats Trying To Cover Up Their Racist Past
For decades, Democrats have tried to cover up their racist past and blame racial tension on Republicans and their policies. While Sen. Cornyn was drafting his bill, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was busy removing portraits and statues of slave holders and segregationists from the Capitol. Pelosi failed to mention that, except for one Independent, all those segregationists and slave holders were Democrats.
Pelosi said nothing about the statues in Baltimore honoring Confederate leaders. Her silence may be attributable to the fact that the statues were erected while her father, Tommy Alessandro, was mayor-for-life of Baltimore. There is a clear pattern here, and I suspect that the removals have more to do with Democrats’ desperate attempt to erase their racist history than with caring for Black lives.
Woke rioters repeated “Black Lives Matter” robotically while ignoring the thousands of Black lives taken by criminal violence (and the thousands more saved from criminal violence by heroic police officers). They still ignore the millions of Black lives sacrificed on the altar of eugenic population control by Democrats in thrall to the death cult of abortion. How many of the woke ones know that hundreds of thousands of white men—soldiers in the Union Army—died to give liberty to the Black men, women, and children who were enslaved? How many know that the system of slavery was protected for centuries by cagey politicians, all of whom were Democrats?
Republicans who fail to embrace Juneteenth allow the perpetuation of Democrat lies and attempts to erase their history. It is a holiday celebrating Republican achievements, and we should be rightly proud of it.
“The Black National Anthem”
Celebrating Juneteenth will ensure that the history of the Emancipation Proclamation and the honorable fight to free the slaves and preserve the Union will not be forgotten. I was in my twenties before I heard of Juneteenth, and in my thirties before I first heard “Lift Every Voice And Sing,” the great hymn that is sometimes called “the Black National Anthem.” Every school child should be taught both the holiday and the hymn, so they learn the history associated with them.
The entire nation would be edified by learning these verses. My favorite is the last:
God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
Thou who has brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who has by Thy might
Led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee,
Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee;
Shadowed beneath Thy hand,
May we forever stand,
True to our God,
True to our native land.
The riots and arson that we saw in the year following the murder of George Floyd will not improve Black lives. They have brought only misery to the communities where they took place. But the pain of the Black community is undeniable. It deserves to be addressed. Symbolic acts are a good starting point for understanding one another. Celebrating Juneteenth together as a national holiday will unite us all in beginning that understanding. We will not survive as a nation if we are divided.
As President Lincoln said in his first Inaugural Address, “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
Bart Marcois (@bmarcois on X) is a former career U.S. diplomat, and was the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Energy for International Affairs. He heads a private consulting practice in Washington, DC, and is a frequent commentator on diplomatic and national security affairs.
Nice try. But if we refer back to the last sentence in the penultimate paragraph we see exactly what is at the heart of such illiteracies as “juneteenth” and such drivel as the “black national anthem” and Kwanzaa. Although the original intent of these things may not have been to divide us, the people who push these things now are hyper-focused on just that. Best not to take the bait and just ignore such provocations.