House Set to Vote on Making Juneteenth a National Holiday

(Bloomberg) -- The House is set to vote Wednesday on creating a federal holiday to mark June 19, the day that commemorates the end of slavery in the U.S., with passage sending the legislation to President Joe Biden for his signature.

Majority Leader Steny Hoyer laid out the timeline a day after the Senate passed its version of the bill by unanimous consent. The companion House legislation, sponsored by Texas Democratic Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, has 166 co-sponsors.

“I look forward to bringing this bill to the Floor, and urge bipartisan support,” Hoyer said in a tweet.

Known as Juneteenth, the commemoration marks the day when the last enslaved African Americans were ordered freed after Union troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, three years after the Emancipation Proclamation. Texas was the last Confederate state where the federal Army re-established its authority, and word of the Civil War’s end -- and slavery’s abolition -- had taken two months to arrive.

Juneteenth would become the 11th annual national holiday on the federal calendar. Federal employees would be given June 19 -- or the Friday or Monday closest to it -- as a paid day off.

The last holiday added to the federal calendar was to honor Martin Luther King Jr. on the third Monday of January. That was passed in 1983 after a 15-year effort and after overcoming a final effort to block it with a filibuster by the late Jesse Helms, a North Carolina Republican.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement that creating the holiday “is a major step forward in recognizing the wrongs of the past, but we must continue to work to ensure equal justice and fulfill the promise of the Emancipation Proclamation and our Constitution.”

State Recognition

Juneteenth is already recognized by 47 states and Washington, D.C., as an official state holiday or observance. Texas was, in 1980, the first state to put it on its calendar. Some companies including, Target Corp., Nike Inc. and Twitter Inc., already designate the day a paid holiday and others may follow with the federal designation.

Texas Republican Senator John Cornyn has sponsored a resolution to commemorate Juneteenth every year since 2011. He co-sponsored legislation to make the date a federal holiday last year, but it was blocked by Wisconsin Republican Senator Ron Johnson, who objected to the cost of giving federal workers another paid holiday.

The push to make it a federal holiday gained momentum in the wake of worldwide protests following the death of George Floyd, a Black man who was killed by a White Minneapolis police officer on May 25, 2020. Former President Donald Trump stirred controversy when he scheduled his first political rally since the coronavirus outbreak for June 19 that year in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where in 1921 White mobs destroyed a Black business district and massacred Black residents. Amid a furor, he rescheduled it for the next day.

This year, Cornyn joined with Democratic Senator Ed Markey to sponsor the legislation making it a federal holiday in the Senate along with Jackson Lee in the House.

The Senate was able to act unanimously after Johnson dropped his objection.

“Although I strongly support celebrating Emancipation, I objected to the cost and lack of debate,” Johnson said in a statement Tuesday. “While it still seems strange that having taxpayers provide federal employees paid time off is now required to celebrate the end of slavery, it is clear that there is no appetite in Congress to further discuss the matter.”

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