Thanks for posting that.
Hmm, I’ve never made red velvet cake. Maybe that’s a good project.
I see UltraVires’ point (and I’ve made a similar point in past threads).
June 19, 1865 was the day slavery was ended in Texas. So it’s fine for Texas to celebrate June 19 as a state holiday.
But slavery did not end throughout the United States on June 19, 1865. The end of slavery in America was December 18, 1865 when the Thirteenth Amendment went into effect. And it wasn’t just a symbolic date; Delaware and Kentucky still had slaves on December 17.
Logically, a national holiday celebrating the end of slavery should be on December 18. However, I concede the point that June 19 has become associated with the end of slavery so, like July 4, it is sanctioned by tradition.
I can see why the Republicans got on board with this. Ending slavery was one of the noble spots in the party’s history.
Huh.
That suddenly explains a LOT of the food purchases I’ve been seeing this week…
Of course, we sell that stuff all the time, but there’s been an uptick in some of that, along with ribs, BBQ stuff, and charcoal for grills.
Damn I’m hungry all of a sudden. Very rarely have I had red velvet cake–but when I have, it sure was good. But… red beans and rice. New Orleans version… yes yes yes yes yes.
Maybe I’ll make some tomorrow but I need a hambone and those are oddly hard to acquire in San Francisco. It’s as if it’s some strange delicacy here… they’re expensive and you might have to go across town to an old-time butcher (or Honey-Baked Ham). I asked for one at Safeway once and the guy looked at me like I asked him to wrap up some fresh tofu for me.
ETA: Maybe I’ll just get some from Krispy Krunchy Chicken. Theirs is pretty good.
Well, are you? I had in mind to do a grocery run today (Friday), and Winco is the place I most often shop. Need answer fast!
The Proclamation did free slaves. It had to be implemented by military action, but it resulted in freed slaves. Prior to the Proclamation, when the Union armies captured territory from the CSA, that did not change the legal status of the slaves in that territory.
Juneteenth is a good example: when the Union army reached that part of Texas, it freed slaves, under the authority of the Proclamation.
It’s also Fathers Day on Sunday.
On a conservative radio station last night I heard the host, happy about the new holiday, complain that the democrats blocked this from happening during the Trump presidency to avoid him getting any of the credit. No cite was offered.
The closest intersection to that in reality is that on Juneteenth 2020 Trump’s first rally since the start of the Covid pandemic was to be held, but after pushback he moved it to June 20th. He then claimed “no one” had really heard of the holiday before then, but that a black Secret Service agent had explained it to him. He then said he “made it very famous.” When asked about the fact that a year prior his own White House had issued a proclamation commemorating Juneteenth he had little of substance to say.
But yeah, there was a couple days last year where Trump at the same time admitted to not knowing what Juneteenth was but also claimed credit for popularizing it. I’m not aware that he ever pursued any legislative efforts at making it a Federal holiday, but facts never intersected too closely with anything the Trumpers claimed. Trump did later say at a campaign event targeting black voters that he was “pledging” to make Juneteenth a Federal holiday, but unless I missed it no action was taken along those lines.
He was gonna do it two weeks after he was reelected.
The Emancipation Proclamation freed some slaves. It didn’t free the slaves, which I believe was the distinction @Deeg was making. It only applied to specified areas in active rebellion against the United States. Slavery was still legal - and actively practiced - in other areas of the United States until the 13 Amendment came into force. The Proclamation didn’t even cover all of the Confederacy. It specifically and explicitly exempted “the Parishes of St. Bernard,Plaquemines, Jefferson, St. John, St. Charles, St. James Ascension, Assumption, Terrebonne, Lafourche, St. Mary, St. Martin, and Orleans, including the City of New Orleans” in Louisiana, and “the forty-eight counties designated as West Virginia, and also the counties of Berkley, Accomac, Northampton, Elizabeth City, York, Princess Ann, and Norfolk, including the cities of Norfolk and Portsmouth” in Virginia.
Which is part of the problem of nailing down a specific date for “the end of slavery” in the United States. There area wide array of dates one could use to mark “the end of slavery”. Since Juneteenth is an extant folk holiday that celebrates the end of slavery in the U.S., and by far the most popular and widespread, and already recognized by a number of states, Congress just recognized that as the official Federal holiday.
If we had anything like an “Armistice Day” for the Civil War, I think that would have made a nice holiday and could be associated with the ending of slavery. Argument being the formal end of the Confederacy would also mean, at that point slavery as a legal institution was firmly “being shut down” in an irrevocable sense. But of course just as we have a number of days we could have picked to celebrate the ending of slavery, we also have a number of days we could have picked to celebrate the end of the Civil War. Most historians and textbooks largely consider the surrender of Lee at Appomattox Courthouse to be the functional end of the Confederacy and its surrender, but of course that isn’t quite the reality. Further fighting did continue, and surrenders continued late into 1865. A group of Cherokee Confederate Indian soldiers didn’t surrender until June 23 1865, and then there CSS Shenandoah didn’t surrender until November 6, 1865. Small scale fighting even continued after that but nothing of real historical note. President Johnson didn’t get around to issuing a proclamation that the war was over until August 20, 1866.
The simple reality is any logical holiday for celebrating the ending of slavery would have the same things you could say about it as you can with Juneteenth. After a certain point all that really matters is that Juneteenth is by far the most popular date of celebration and is well known at this point in the black community. The only real competitor would have been Emancipation Day, which has a small history of being celebrated, but to a lesser degree than Juneteenth. One thing that undermines “Emancipation Day” as having developed is most of the states that observe it to some degree, actually observe things like the date that the Emancipation Proclamation was first read in that state, or that it first was effectively exercised. So it’s a smattering of days all over the calendar.
Hmm… now I get to thinking – Puerto Rico (22 March) and the US Virgin Islands (3 July), who in the 1800s were colonies of other powers, have their own entirely separate and unrelated emancipation histories, whose dates have been official public holidays for a long time. Even the US Federal Court in Puerto Rico has for decades observed PR Emancipation Day as a holiday.
I remember back when the Federal Government set their “Columbus Day” to be in a specific Monday in October, the government in Puerto Rico at first joined but then reverted and held on for their public holiday for “Día de la Raza” to stay on the 12th of October, resulting in a few decades of different days off depending on your public-sector status and/or which level regulated your industry (e.g. brokerages observed the federal one), until a bunch of holidays were consolidated in 2017.
Gonna be interesting to see whether the local level in San Juan will be proclaiming we now have TWO emancipation holidays…
In Trump’s mind, it doesn’t matter whether or not something gets done. The only thing that matters is whether Trump gets credit for something.
So to Trump making a public speech and pledging to make Juneteenth a holiday was the success; people applauded him. After that, actually working on fulfilling his promise was meaningless; he had already received the applause just by making the promise.
Starting with Thanksgiving and continuing through Christmas, NYE, MLK Day and then President’s Day, we have many holidays between November and February. And then there’s a drought until Memorial Day. I’d kind of like it if the holidays were more evenly spread out.
We do. It’s called memorial day, and it’s why we celebrate “veterans day” instead of armistice day.
But it’s historically been about the soldiers, not about freeing the slaves. So it’s nice to add a holiday to commemorate the end of slavery.
And the history clearly shows that the slaves weren’t all freed on one date. It was a long, drawn-out process. Any date would be arbitrary. This date happened to have caught on as a traditional celebration among the descendants of those freed, which makes it a fine date to celebrate. It’s maybe valuable that it, by it’s very choice, points out just how slow and capricious the end of slavery was.
Depends on what you mean by “compressed schedule.” I am a Federal employee that gets every other Friday, including 6/18, off. (“How do you get away with that?” I work 9 hours/day every Monday through Thursday, and 8 hours on the Fridays when I do work.) Because of that, I would have gotten 6/17 off as the holiday, but since the bill wasn’t signed into law until around 4 PM that day, I get Monday 6/21 off instead.
Evidently which day given worker gets off depends on whose umbrella they’re under. Commerce workers who would normally get Friday off will receive premium pay for the 17th and work Monday at normal pay.
Fair enough.