Juneteenth: Progress amid the ongoing struggle for true justice and equality

We are overjoyed at the exciting news this past week around Oregon and the United States officially recognizing Juneteenth celebrations, and commemorating the emancipation of enslaved people in Texas in June 1865 nearly two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation.

First, Governor Kate Brown signed into law a bill to establish Juneteenth as an official state holiday in Oregon. Then, just a few days later, President Joe Biden signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act to establish Juneteenth as an official federal holiday.

Oregon is the only state in America to have been established as an all-white state. Celebrating Juneteenth as a legal holiday in Oregon and America matters a great deal, and brings our state and country closer to reckoning with the present impacts of a past rooted in white supremacy.

This can be a moment when we acknowledge the trauma of 4 million enslaved people, while trying to understand that trauma through the eyes of their descendants. We can make it clear that, despite social progress for Black Americans, considerable barriers continue to impede true justice and equality. These barriers go beyond 300+ years of slavery, Jim Crow, and on-going white supremacy. They include sub-standard education, discrimination in housing, lack of economic investment in Black communities, disproportionate access to quality health care, and murder by law enforcement.

By choosing to remember the last state in the South that freedom finally touched, we celebrate the shining 'promise of emancipation.' Let June 19th in Oregon and America forever be a day of celebration for current and future generations, as well as a day to remember and acknowledge the bloody path America took by delaying freedom and deferring the fulfillment of the simple words of Union General Gordon Granger that 'all slaves are free.'

Thank you,

Rosa Colquitt, PhD
Vice Chair, Democratic Party of Oregon
Chair, Democratic Party of Oregon Black Caucus

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