I don’t well remember the lead-up to adoption of the Martin Luther King’s Birthday federal holiday, but I do remember when it was not yet a federal holiday. I do have an older child’s recollection – I was maybe 12 or so – of an early-1980s PBS documentary (or maybe a docu-drama?) about Martin Luther King that was followed by a an on-air call for his birthday to become a federal holiday.
Regarding the newest federal holiday, Juneteenth, it’s hard for me to not think the October 3, 2017 episode (S4, Ep1) of the comedy series Black-ish had a big role in the eventual adoption of the holiday less than four years later. I’m sure I wasn’t moving in the right informational circles to be made aware, but in fall 2017 … Juneteenth didn’t seem to me to be any closer to becoming a federal holiday than it was 10, 20, 50,100 years earlier. It seems like virtually all the legwork to make Juneteenth into a federal holiday took place in just a few years. Academically, I know there had to have been essays, speeches, and other grass-roots efforts going on for decades preparing Juneteenth to go national.
So, in thinking about how MLK’s Birthday and Juneteenth eventually crossed over from non-federal observances to federal holidays … it makes me wonder if anything else is being regularly observed somewhere in the U.S. – right now – that could become (or even likely to become) a federal holiday in the foreseeable future?
I’m thinking in terms strictly in terms of single-day federal holidays in which banks close, mail is not delivered, etc. as opposed to new “Heritage Months” or anything spanning longer periods of time.
I was going to say that I had heard the idea of Columbus Day perhaps morphing into Indigenous People’s Day.
Columbus Day was always a weird one to me. We didn’t even get a day of school for that one! But yes, I have read the history of the holiday and how Italian-American groups (chiefly in NYC?) pushed for the federal holiday.
I predict that within 20 years, the federal holiday that falls on the second Monday in October that is currently called Columbus Day will officially be renamed Indigenous Peoples’ Day. There may still be an officially recognized Columbus Day on Oct. 12, but it will not involve the closure of federal government offices.
I predict that within 20 years, there will be a new federal holiday to honor Hispanic heritage. El Día de la Raza is probably out since it is celebrated on or about the same date as Columbus Day/Indigenous Peoples’ Day. The most likely date for the new holiday will be March 31, the birthday of Cesar Chavez. It is already a state holiday in California (with schools and state offices closed) and recognized in several other states (red, blue, and purple) and municipalities as holiday but typically without closure of government offices and schools.
Here in the Chicago area, which also has a significant population of Italian descent, Columbus Day does seem to be mostly “Italian-American Heritage Day.”
In Minnesota, Italian descendants would gather by the statue of Columbus on the State Capitol grounds. But Scandinavian descendants would gather on the other side by the statue of Leif Erickson. After competing speeches, catcalls, etc. they would eventually meet in the center of the Capitol grounds for a mass fight. Then all leave to go to their neighborhood bars.
Five or ten years ago, I would have agreed that 9/11 was bound for becoming a Federal holiday. I’m not so certain of that anymore: it’s certainly still seen as an important event in the nation’s history, and that day has a lot of memorial services and retrospectives, but it also seems, to me, like the shock and impact of that day, and its aftermath, have faded in the national consciousness.
I wonder if the overall contentiousness and national discord we’re now dealing with have caused the sense of unity and national purpose that came out of 9/11 to become less relevant.
Pearl Harbor Day is not a national holiday, I don’t see why 9/11 should be.
My take is that 9/11 is an event that today’s kids and young adults can’t relate to. When I visited the site in
April, 2022, I had to remind my kids that, technically, it was a cemetery, and I don’t care how other people are behaving, you will be respectful.
I imagine it was the same for children born in the late-50s and later. “Pearl Harbor? That was my parents thing.”
Indeed. Someone under 25 has no memory of it at all; for someone 25-35, if they remember the actual event, it’s something from their childhood, and it likely didn’t have the same visceral impact on them that it did for people who were adults (or even older teenagers) in 2001.
I have a feeling that might vary by location - I live in NYC and for most of the 27-35 year-olds I know, it seems to have had the same impact on them as it has on adults. But I know kids in the NYC area had a very different experience than kids in Wisconsin or Idaho.
I have never thought 9/11 was going to become a Federal holiday anytime soon. Not because people can’t relate to it or because it has faded. But because of the three-day weekend effect. Any such holiday would almost certainly be scheduled on a Monday, and would replace Labor Day weekend as the unofficial end of summer. And that’s going to have to wait until a lot of people die off - I heard people objecting to that idea before the end of 2001 , before there was really any thought of establishing a holiday.
In Chicago, which has a large Polish population, they celebrate Casimir Pulaski Day. City offices are closed, a fact which caught me by surprise one year when I went to make a payment on my property taxes after work.