It finally happened. President Joe Biden signed into law a bill to make Juneteenth a federal holiday on Thursday following passage of the bill in both chambers of Congress. He thanked Mrs. Opal Lee, the 94-year-old “Grandmother of the Juneteenth Holiday Movement” who pushed vigorously for years to see this moment happen. He referenced the massacre in which a white supremacist killed nine people at a church in South Carolina six years ago to the day. Then, the president explained what the day means for him and invited Lee and legislators who were instrumental in the bill’s formation on stage with him as he signed the Juneteenth bill into law. “I’ve only been president for several months, but I think this will go down for me as one of the greatest honors I will have had as president,” Biden said.

Juneteenth, which falls on June 19, is remembered as the day many slaves learned they were free in 1865, a full two and-a-half years after the Emancipation Proclamation legally freed them on Jan. 1, 1863. It coincides with when Union Gen. Gordon Granger announced the news in Galveston, Texas, two months after the end of the Civil War. 

Vice President Kamala Harris said during her remarks: “So think about that. For more than two years the enslaved people of Texas were kept in servitude. For more than two years, they were intentionally kept from their freedom, for more than two years. And then on that summer day 156 years ago, the enslaved people of Texas learned the news. They learned that they were free, and they claimed their freedom. It was indeed an important day.”

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Lee told CBS DFW before the signing she has so many feelings “all gurgling up in here.” “I don’t know what to call them all,” she said. “I am so delighted to know that suddenly we’ve got a Juneteenth. It’s not a Texas thing or a black thing. It’s an American thing.”

Bernice King, activist and youngest child of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., told CNN before Biden signed the legislation that today is an “important moment of reckoning.” “A lot of Black Americans don’t feel included in Independence Day because many of our ancestors were not free,” King said. She also emphasized the importance of doing the work to liberate the Black community along all fronts, from housing discrimination to passing essential federal voting rights legislation.

And when asked, King did something I was tempted not to: She mentioned the 14 Republican members of the House of Representatives who voted against the legislation passed unanimously in the Senate. King repeated the words of her father: “A persistent schizophrenia leaves so many of us tragically divided against ourselves. On the one hand, we proudly profess certain sublime and noble principles, but on the other hand, we sadly practice the very antithesis of these principles.” 

The names of the 14 sitting members of Congress who actually opposed legislation commemorating the end of slavery are:

Andy Biggs of Arizona; Mo Brooks of Alabama; Andrew Clyde of Georgia; Scott DesJarlais of Tennessee; Paul Gosar of Arizona; Ronny Jackson of Texas; Doug LaMalfa of California; Thomas Massie of Kentucky; Tom McClintock of California; Ralph Norman of South Carolina; Mike Rogers of Alabama; Matt Rosendale of Montana; Chip Roy of Texas; and Tom Tiffany of Wisconsin.

Rosendale, Montana’s only congressman, said in a statement KTVH obtained that the legislation is part of a “hard-left agenda to enshrine the racial history of this country as the prime aspect of our national story.” “They do not want to highlight all the good this country has brought to the world – flight, our Constitution, the defeat of communism and Nazism, the Internet – but, instead, our racial sins,” he continued. “America is good, and efforts to cast the country as otherwise should be opposed.”

America is good to white people, and efforts to cast the country as otherwise—more commonly referred to as telling the truth—should be encouraged, the goal being for America to one day be good for all people. 

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