Headline Roundup • June 19th, 2025
Juneteenth 2025: The State of Freedom for Black Americans
Summary from the AllSides News Team
Thursday is Juneteenth, a recently federalized holiday where Americans commemorate the end of slavery, and media across the spectrum have published perspectives on the holiday's significance in observance.
From the Right: Dan McLaughlin (Right bias) of National Review (Right) argued that Juneteenth should be seen as a celebration of law enforcement. McLaughlin said the holiday represents the enforcement of laws that liberated slaves, with the holiday specifically marking the day when Union Army General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, to declare slavery's end. The article emphasized the importance of enforcement in making laws effective and that, without enforcement, there is no freedom from predators or enslavement.
From the Left: MSNBC (Left) published an opinion from Donney Rose, who argued that despite the recognition of Juneteenth as a federal holiday, black people are less free today than they were when President Biden federalized it in 2021. Rose said President Donald Trump’s actions seem to target and remove black leaders from prominent positions and threaten the federal funding of schools that teach diverse curricula. This, the author says, could potentially turn Juneteenth into a footnote in American classrooms, thus diminishing the significance of the holiday. The article also expresses concern about the impact of Trump's policies on access to higher education for black students. The author frames these developments as a modern form of captivity, created by the deprivation of black people's full history.
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Featured Coverage of this Story
Today is Juneteenth. It is still relatively new as a federal holiday, and is unfamiliar in a lot of the country. But it is an old holiday. As I explained in 2021, it has been popularly celebrated in some parts of the country since Reconstruction, and while I generally dislike the expansion of the list of mandatory holidays, its topic — the liberation of American slaves – is a fit one for celebration, especially given that we scandalously fail to observe Lincoln’s birthday as a national holiday.
Tilde Oyster / NBC News
I was a student at Southern University, a historically Black university, when I learned the truth about Juneteenth and its correlation with our freedom. I may have heard of Juneteenth before then, but I couldn’t have told you that it fell on June 19 or that it celebrated the day after the Civil War when enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, learned they were free. I learned the truth because of the Afrocentric brothers and sisters on campus who more or less demanded that their schoolmates “do the knowledge” about our history.
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