This year, for the first time, Alabama — the Heart of Dixie, where Klansmen bombed a Black church, Black leaders boycotted segregated buses and Gov. George Wallace personally stood in the doorway of the University of Alabama to keep Black students out — will celebrate Juneteenth as an official state holiday.
The state legislature last month approved legislation honoring the day that marks the unofficial end of slavery after the Civil War. Officials plan to celebrate the day with community activities and free admission to state legacy sites, including the Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice — also known as the Lynching Museum.
Juneteenth has been a federal holiday since 2021. For the last four years, Alabama’s current Republican governor, Kay Ivey, used her executive powers to designate Juneteenth as a state holiday. The legislation will make the designation permanent.
“Since President Trump observed Juneteenth in June of 2020, we have proclaimed it each year, and I am pleased the Legislature has made it an official state holiday,” Ivey said in a terse statement.
For Brenda Ward, this year’s celebration is merely the first step.
“I’m looking forward to it being taught in school more as well as in the churches through classes or the community centers,” said Ward, chair of the National Juneteenth Observance Foundation of Alabama.
The bill, which cleared the House of Representatives last month by an 85-4 vote, was sponsored by Republican Rep. Rick Rehm. Alabama senators didn’t debate the bill, but many of the chamber’s Republican members chose not to vote on it. The state has a GOP supermajority in both legislative houses.
“This is a bill that is constituent-driven, that is brought to me by my constituents,” Rehm said when introducing his bill on the House floor in April. “To me, this is a very important holiday because Juneteenth celebrates the end of 330 years of the West African slave trade.”
Black Democrats Tried to Pass the Bill
But the bill is more or less identical to one Alabama’s Black Democratic lawmakers introduced repeatedly for several years. Republicans, concerned that adding a new state holiday would increase costs for taxpayers, killed that bill again and again.
“We can’t carry a bill to acknowledge what has happened to us [or] get it out of committee,” said Rep. Mary Moore, a Black Democrat from Birmingham, in reaction to Rehm’s bill. “But you can bring the bill and get it out of committee, a bill that’s about us! There’s something wrong with that — that the only way that it could be a good bill is if somebody else carries it, and not the people that were affected by it in the first place.”
Juneteenth commemorates June 19, 1865, the day enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, were officially granted their freedom — even though President Abraham Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation two years earlier.
Alabama became a U.S. state on December 14, 1819, after several Native American tribes were forced to move west of the Mississippi River. During the early to mid-1800s, the state’s wealthy farmers considered slavery essential to their economy, and Alabama was one of the nation’s largest slaveholding states. Alabama was among the first six states to join the Confederacy.
Alabama still recognizes three Confederate-related state holidays, including one in January that jointly honors Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert E. Lee.
