Biden signs law making Juneteenth a federal holiday, 156 years after Texas slaves learned they’d been freed two years earlier

Updated at 3:15 p.m. with law signed and comments.

WASHINGTON – Saturday will mark 156 years since Union forces landed in Galveston with belated news that slaves had been emancipated more than two years earlier.

On Thursday, President Joe Biden signed a law declaring a national holiday for Juneteenth, the day long recognized as the official end of slavery in the United States.

A 94-year-old Fort Worth civil rights icon, Opal Lee, was at his side, holding the hand of Kamala Harris, the first woman of color to serve as vice president.

“Great nations don’t ignore their most painful moments…. They embrace them,” Biden said. “Great nations don’t walk away. They come to terms with the mistakes that were made.”

Juneteenth has been a state holiday in Texas for four decades, and has spread to nearly every state in recent years as a celebration of freedom and national evolution.

For Biden, the East Room ceremony marked the second time in two weeks that he’s thrown the full moral weight of the presidency behind a call to confront past inequities. On June 1, he traveled to Oklahoma for a somber commemoration of the 1921 massacre of hundreds of Black Tulsa residents at the hands of a white mob.

A bipartisan and racially diverse group of VIPs crammed into the gilt adorned East Room for the Juneteenth bill signing, none more glittering than Lee, who drew attention to the cause in 2016 by walking from her hometown to Washington.

“I’m just – I don’t know what to say. Joyful, humble, exhilarated,” she told The Dallas Morning News. “I want people to understand: It’s not a Black thing, it’s not a Texas thing. It’s an American thing.”

Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, led the push in Congress for the new holiday with Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, a Houston Democrat. Both stood with Biden in the East Room as he signed the legislation, along with other lawmakers.

Biden handed Lee one of several pens he used to sign the measure into law.

“When we all decide that we’re brothers and sisters under the skin, that we all want the same thing — a decent place to stay, a job that pays decent wages, schools, adequate healthcare. When we get together and dispel those discrepancies, we will be the greatest nation in the whole wide world,” Lee told The News.

The holiday came together with astonishing speed this week.

Sen. Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican, had blocked the bill for months, arguing that the federal budget couldn’t take the strain of another paid day off for workers. He abruptly dropped his objection on Tuesday and within hours, the Senate unanimously approved the bill, followed Wednesday by the House on a 415-14 vote.

The breakthrough came after an impassioned push by the woman the vice president called “the one and only Miss Opal Lee,” who was seated in a place of honor in the front row at Thursday’s ceremony.

Biden walked over, knelt and clasped her by both hands as the audience gave her an ovation.

In 1939, when she was 12, he recounted, Lee’s family home was torched by a white mob, but “such hate never stopped her.”

It’s the first new federal holiday since Congress created Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 1983.

Hours before Biden formally signed the legislation, the Office of Personnel Management announced that the federal government will close on Friday, because June 19 falls on a weekend this year.

“We can’t rest until the promise of equality is fulfilled for every one of us,” Biden said. “That to me is the meaning of Juneteenth.”

President Joe Biden signs the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act in the East Room of the White House on June 17, 2021. Fort Worth civil rights icon Opal Lee, 94, is next to Vice President Kamala Harris. Texas Sen. John Cornyn is in the back, next to Georgia Sen. Rafael Warnock. At right, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Houston, holds one of the pens Biden used to sign the law.(Drew Angerer / Getty Images)

President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863, freeing all slaves in Confederate territory.

On June 19, 1865, Gen. Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston to inform some of the last slaves in the United States of their freedom, and bringing news that the Civil War had ended more than two months earlier when Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9.

“‘The people of Texas are informed that in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free,’” Granger declared.

“We must learn from history. And we must teach our children our history,” Harris said. “We are gathered here in a house built by enslaved people. We are footsteps away from where President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation…. We have come far, and we have far to go.”

She is the first woman of color to serve as vice president. Biden held the job under the nation’s first Black president.

In Texas the holiday is also called “Juneteenth Independence Day,” “Freedom Day” or “Emancipation Day.”

“We need to understand our history,” Cornyn said Thursday. “It actually is a troubling history, starting with the original sin of slavery. But what ought to give us hope and optimism is that we’ve come a long way. To me, that’s the story of Juneteenth. And the fact that we’ve elected an African American president of the United States and we’re seeing such robust participation in voting and civil activities by African Americans is something to be proud of and encouraged.”

Opal Lee, 94, a Fort Worth civil rights icon, sits at the desk where President Joe Biden (left) had just signed a law making Juneteenth a national holiday on June 17, 2021. Behind her are Reps. Sheila Jackson Lee of Houston and Marc Veasey of Fort Worth.(Evan Vucci / AP)

Reps. Colin Allred of Dallas, Marc Veasey of Fort Worth and Al Green of Houston, Democrats, were among the many members of the Congressional Black Caucus at the bill signing.

Black leaders embraced the new holiday while also noting how many lingering issues remain.

Some have called for tangible, perhaps even monetary reparations for descendants of slaves; Jackson Lee has proposed a commission to study the concept.

Democrats point to efforts in Austin and other state capitols to alter election rules in ways they consider echoes of Jim Crow – intentionally trying to hamper voting by minorities – and the symbolism of a national holiday will not ease demands for renewed federal protections.

“I find it ironic that we would pass legislation for something that is ceremonial but things that are substantive, our Congress is a bit schizophrenic,” Bernice King, CEO of the King Center and daughter of MLK, told CNN. “We still face issues of injustice and inequality.”

As for Lee, she’ll be back in Fort Worth on Saturday for the first nationally official Juneteenth. She, too, emphasized that declaring a holiday to mark the end of slavery does not end the struggle.

“The disparities in our country, the homelessness, the joblessness, schools not being able to tell the children the truth, healthcare, climate change – we got a world of work to do,” she said.