Juneteenth celebrations this year are poised to look different as several corporations, local governments, and federal groups divest from honoring the emancipation of enslaved people in the United States following President Donald Trump’s continued push against diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Juneteenth Day—which commemorates June 19, 1865, when Union Army Major General Gordon Granger rode into Galveston, Texas, and told enslaved people of their emancipation—is the oldest regular US celebration of the end of slavery. In June 2021, former president Joe Biden signed legislation establishing Juneteenth as a federal holiday.
“You never know what you have until it’s gone, and a lot is being stripped away,” Erica Loewe, former assistant to President Biden and chief of staff of the White House Office of Public Engagement, told The Grio.
On his first day in office, January 20, Trump signed the executive order, “Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs And Preferencing,” calling on every federal agency, department, or commission head to evaluate which programs included diversity initiatives and terminate them. In the months since taking office, Trump and his administration have continued to rail against institutions—public and private—that support diversity.
Following Trump’s actions, the Department of Defense’s intelligence agency paused observances of cultural or historical annual events, including Juneteenth Day. Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell told CNN earlier this month that the agency is “proud of our warriors and their history,” but will focus “on the character of their service instead of their immutable characteristics.”
This year, with the Republicans’ coordinated rollback of funding and support for initiatives centered on racial equity, Juneteenth celebrations in states across the country—from West Virginia to California—have been negatively impacted.
Private corporations have pulled their support for public displays that could be construed as supporting DEI, including Pride and Juneteenth events.
In Denver, more than a dozen companies have backed out from supporting the Juneteenth Music Festival, according to Norman Harris, executive director of JMF Corporation, which puts on the event. The festival is one of the city’s biggest celebrations of the holiday. Elsewhere in the state, in Colorado Springs, organizers were forced to scale down their plans and move locations due to fewer sponsors and cuts in city funding, Jennifer Smith, a planner for the Southern Colorado Juneteenth Festival, told the Associated Press. “They have said their budgets have been cut,” Smith said, “because of DEI.”
In Indianapolis, Juneteenth event organizers announced that they were pausing the parade, but would still host other events throughout the month to celebrate. “We were ultimately denied by public safety officials due to reported concerns from nearby residents, despite similar events taking place in that area in the past,” Indy Juneteenth Inc. Executive Director James Webb told CNN.
In West Virginia, Republican governor Patrick Morrisey’s office announced that the state wouldn’t host any Juneteenth events this year for the first time since 2017. The stop was due to “continued fiscal challenges,” according to deputy press secretary Drew Galang. However, just last month, Morrisey signed a bill to end all diversity programs.
“Businesses pulling back and universities canceling programs in response to attacks on DEI shows that many institutions and corporations were never truly committed to diversity and inclusion,” LaTasha Levy, a professor of Afro-American Studies at Howard University, told CNN. “I think it really affirms what we’ve already known. There are too many entities in our country who are not serious about freedom and liberation.”
Trump’s move to target the National Endowment for the Arts earlier this year impacted other Juneteenth Day celebrations. The endowment provides hundreds of millions of dollars each year to individuals and institutions around the country, including those hosting Juneteenth events.
The Cooper Family Foundation, which throws one of the largest Juneteenth celebrations in San Diego each year, was told by the NEA in May that its $25,000 grant was being taken away. Maliya Jones, who works for the foundation, said that the email they received said the event no longer aligned with the agency’s priorities. The organization, which will still host the event, was forced to figure out alternative funding at the last minute. “We will always have Juneteenth,” Marla Cooper, who leads the foundation, said, “And we will work it out.”
A museum in Fredericksburg, Virginia, also had to scale back its Juneteenth celebration because of cuts from the National Endowment for the Arts.
The museum’s grant was retracted on April 29th, “well after planning begun for this year’s festivities,” the president and CEO of the Fredericksburg Area Museum, Sam McKelvey, told CNN. “We are still holding a much smaller event with the museum in the red, but the community has stepped up for us and allowed us to make it still happen.”
Despite leading the push against diversity initiatives harming Juneteenth celebrations across the nation, Trump, in his first term, claimed that he ought to receive credit for popularizing the celebration.
In 2020, Trump planned a rally on June 19 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the site of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. After receiving criticism, he pushed it back a day—though not before saying he had helped make Juneteenth “famous.”
“I did something good: I made Juneteenth very famous,” Trump told The Wall Street Journal in reference to the rally date. “It’s actually an important event, an important time. But nobody had ever heard of it.”
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