Celebrate Juneteenth – and the Fall of the Wall
“No, no, 1,000 times no,” said a prominent conservative intellectual when I asked if he celebrated Juneteenth, the new national holiday commemorating when the last slaves in a remote part of Texas were freed after the Civil War. Like many on the Right, my friend perceives Juneteenth as part of a broad leftist campaign to define America by its legacy of slavery – even though slavery was practiced by nearly every other people on Earth, and by a few even today.
Yet Juneteenth doesn’t have to be anti-American. Juneteenth should instead join July Fourth, Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK) Day, and a new holiday, Fall of the Berlin Wall (FBW) Day on November 9, as one of America’s four Freedom Days.
National holidays have political purposes. Before enabling long weekends at the beach, Labor Day legitimized unions. Columbus Day placated Italian-American voters incensed by events like the 1891 lynching of 11 Italians in New Orleans. Increasingly, Columbus Day is morphing into Indigenous Peoples’ Day, reflecting contemporary political sensibilities.
The problem with Juneteenth is that it seems to be part of an elite movement, exemplified by the “1619 Project,” to define the United States as a land of slavery rather than freedom. The text of President Biden’s original 2021 proclamation establishing the new holiday suggests as much, failing to even mention the Union forces which suffered 820,000 casualties freeing the slaves.
Much of the negative rebranding of America is led by Marxists seeking to win a 70-year struggle in the classroom that they lost in the real world, where Marxist regimes failed so spectacularly that they erected giant barriers like the Berlin Wall to keep people from fleeing to the free world. In this Marxists resemble Confederate apologists who a century ago created the Lost Cause Myth justifying slavery, as if thousands of African Americans had fled south to enjoy slavery, rather than north to escape it.
Yet the sensible, non-Marxist majority in each major political party should not reject Juneteenth but appropriate it as part of our national history in advancing freedom – not slavery – by making it one of our country’s four national Freedom Days.
Naturally, the foremost Freedom Day is the July Fourth holiday, which celebrates the passage of the Declaration of Independence that freed America from Great Britain. While nearly every country had slavery, only the U.S. produced the Declaration, arguably the greatest pro-freedom (and thus anti-slavery) document in world history.
As civil rights leader and historian Roger Wilkens wrote in “Jefferson’s Pillow: The Founding Fathers and the Dilemma of Black Patriotism,” despite sharing the failings of their time, the American founders created a system which enables citizens to have the freedom to make changes for the better.
A second Freedom Day is MLK Day, which commemorates the 1965 Voting Rights Act and other laws assuring the full rights of citizens regardless of color. As political scientists Charles Bullock and R. Keith Gaddie show in their award-winning “The Triumph of Voting Rights in the South,” black voter turnout in the South now equals white turnout, a civil rights triumph which reporters never report.
Though less important, Juneteenth serves as an antecedent to MLK Day, marking one of the events paving the way for Dr. King’s triumphs.
To counter Critical Race Theory and other threats, America now needs a fourth Freedom Day, November 9, the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. FBW Day would mark the defeat of Marxism as a global force. From Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan, our leaders and people played indispensable roles in containing and eventually defeating Marxist regimes (led by the likes of former KGB Colonel Vladimir Putin) which murdered over 90 million people while crushing political, economic, religious, artistic, and sexual freedoms. We must never forget this history, lest humanity be doomed to repeat it.
Because schools fail to teach the real history of our own nation, let alone the history of Marxist countries like Cuba, China, North Korea, and increasingly Putin’s Russia, today some rightists justify the Jan. 6 attempted dismantling of the U.S. Constitution, while some leftists think the only thing wrong with Jan. 6 is that the wrong people were doing it.
Together, the four Freedom Days would counter both authoritarian and Marxist efforts to pervert the meaning of America. Restoring the paradigm that America means freedom would truly make America great again.
Robert Maranto is the 21st Century Chair in Leadership at the University of Arkansas and a former elected official. These opinions are his alone.
