Image Credits: Reuters
The U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday overwhelmingly passed and sent to President Joe Biden a bill making June 19, or “Juneteenth,” a federal holiday commemorating the top of legal enslavement of Black Americans.
Biden to sign the bill into law at a White House event on Thursday afternoon.
The holiday marks the day in 1865 when a Union general informed a gaggle of enslaved people in Texas that that they had been made free two years earlier by President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation during the war .
During House floor debate, Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, a Texas Democrat, appeared beside a well known black-and-white photograph showing a man’s back scarred from whippings during slavery. She said she had introduced legislation within the House to form Juneteenth a federal holiday “to commemorate the top of chattel slavery, America’s sin, and to cause celebration.”
The House approved the bill with the vote of 415-14. The Senate unanimously passed the bill on Tuesday.
Its success comes a year after the us was rocked by protests against racism and policing following the murder of the African-American man George Floyd by a Minneapolis policeman .
Republican Representative Guy Reschenthaler touted the role his northern home state of Pennsylvania played within the war .
“Designating June 19 as a legal holiday would increase awareness of … Juneteenth,” he said. it might celebrate Black history and culture. it might recognize the Americans who fought and died to finish slavery.”
Texas officially declared Juneteenth a state holiday in 1980 and since then the vacation has been officially recognized in most U.S. states.
Juneteenth would be the eleventh federally recognized holiday, joining an inventory that has Christmas and New Year’s Day Day, Thanksgiving and Independence Day and honoring presidents and slain civil rights said by leader Martin Luther King Jr.