Our Newest Holiday

Last Monday  was Juneteenth; the first new federal holiday in 17 years. The numbers are confusing me a little; it was in 1983 that the third Monday in January became a Federal holiday. That was forty years ago. And, it took us from 1968 to 1983 to make that happen. Then, the year 2000 is the date that –finally–  all fifty states acknowledged the holiday. Thirty two years after it was first introduced as a bill in congress.

So forgive an aging activist, for my first reaction to Junettenth as a federal holiday that I should be interested in as kind of like being a dog that has been given a bone.

After the George Floyd antifascism uprisings. To get us all to quiet down and to shut up.

And seeing that image of President Joe Biden on one knee in front of Ms. Opal Lee– the grandmother of Juneenth– truly upsets my stomach. Biden, being a lynchpin; one of the men that I hold responsible for our current state of conservative Republican judicial craziness. Remember your HER-tory? He's the one who refused to let two additional Black women testify at the Clarence Thomas judicial confirmation hearings, making it that much easier to throw Dr. Anita Thomas under the the bus, pre “#METOO”.

But, I digress.

I admit to being an aging activist, who might actually be a little jealous of the apparent ease with which Ms. Opal Lee got this meme propagating. In my mind, Juneteenth went from an embarrassing reminder of how little we Black folk matter, here in AmeriKKKa (my GAWD–two years and 2 months to even hear about the end of the Civil War?) to full national holiday status, moving faster than Canadian Wildfires!

But I have come to understand the limitations to that story in my head. I have minimized the hard work, the determination that I witness in the life and work of Ms. Opal Lee. She has been a shining star of political and social activism her entire life, and at 96 remains an honored Elder. Her commitment to this cause has educated members of the larger Black American community regarding the Black Texan Experience of Juneteenth. I didn’t know that it has been a holy day to Black Texans descended from slaves since 1866. I didn’t know that East Coast enslavers from Virginia and the Carolinas had been transporting their slaves to Texas throughout the Civil War, knowing that Texas would be one of the last places to Fall to the Union (if it fell, at all). I didn’t know that enslaver panic had doubled the number of enslaved African people in Texas to 250,000. I didn’t know that Black Texans celebrated “Juneteenth”, despite having white Texans repeatedly and doggedly attack the celebrations. Ms. Opal Lee herself was a survivor of such white hatred. Her family home was burned to the ground by a white mob on Juneenth, the year she was 12.

Perhaps that fire is the thing that fed the fire in her heart to pursue– over forty years– a courageous life of activism. Her two and a half mile walks were both fund-raisers and educational opportunities, representing the two and a half additional years of illegal enslavement experienced by black Texans. Her Change.org petition to make Junettenth a national holiday received over a million and a half signatures.

Oh, the ups and the downs she must have experienced! She was brave-hearted enough to seek an audience with President Barack Obama to petition for this holiday; but she must have been politically wise enough to see that there was no way in HELL that a Black president would be able to move forward with that dream.

Then, four years of Trumpocalyptic backlash. And covid-19. Finally, an “American basketball-style save of our minimally democratic asses as the buzzer sounds swish through the hoop” of a Blue State win…Delivered by the African American women and the Indigenous people still treading water, out here in the deep end of the pool. 

Mixed metaphors I know– maybe we are in a water polo game. And you all know how welcome we colored girls have been, in America’s pools  and in its country clubs. 

Yet there’s Lady Opal Lee, 96. Two years into the new tradition of a federal holiday, photographed dancing and smiling and laughing.

I am inspired by the women Elders in my life, and the power of their persistence of vision.