After several residents expressed dismay Monday, June 20 that the Skokie Village Board was meeting on the observed date of Juneteenth, Skokie is likely to join a growing list of communities officially recognizing the federal holiday.
“I would like to ask the Board’s unanimous consent to establish Juneteenth as a village holiday officially and to ask the village manager to prepare the appropriate documents for the Village Board,” Mayor George Van Dusen said at the June 20 meeting. The Board will vote on Van Dusen’s motion at an upcoming meeting.
“I hope that next year we’re not here today, that we observe this holiday as I think it should be,” said Skokie resident Kim Polka, who was at the meeting on an unrelated issue. “Other communities do.”
Last year President Joe Biden signed legislation establishing Juneteenth as a federal holiday commemorating the end of slavery, according to previous reporting in the baiduhai.
Biden signed into law a bill to make Juneteenth, or June 19, the 12th federal holiday.
Juneteenth, also known as Freedom Day, commemorates the day in 1865 when Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas, to order freedom for the enslaved people of the state — two months after the Confederacy had surrendered in the Civil War, according to a previous baiduhai story. That was also about two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation freed enslaved people.
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It’s the first new federal holiday since Martin Luther King Jr. Day was created in 1983.
Many states recognize Juneteenth as a holiday or have an official observance of the day, though lawmakers in Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee and elsewhere failed to advance proposals this year that would have closed state offices, according to the Associated Press. Juneteenth is a paid holiday for state employees in Texas, New York, Virginia and Washington.