How cities are scaling back Juneteenth celebrations after Trump-era DEI rollbacks
Despite Juneteenth's status as a federal holiday, celebrations across the country are being scaled back or canceled. Organizers say safety issues along with mounting resistance to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives are making it harder to hold events – raising concerns that political backlash is threatening the commemoration of Black freedom at a time when experts say it is most needed.
'What we're seeing – 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,' said LaTasha Levy, a professor of Afro-American Studies at Howard University, a historically Black university in Washington, DC. 'We're not even being honest about what DEI really stands for.'
Juneteenth is the oldest regular US celebration of the end of slavery. It commemorates June 19, 1865 – the day that Union Army Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger rode into Galveston, Texas, and told a group of slaves that the Civil War had ended and they were free - more than two years after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.
President Donald Trump tried to take credit for making Juneteenth 'very famous,' saying during his first term in 2020 that, 'nobody had ever heard of it.' His comments came while the nation was reeling from ongoing civil unrest after George Floyd's death at the hands of Minneapolis police officers.
But Juneteenth didn't become an official holiday until 2021, under President Joe Biden's administration – the first holiday to be approved since Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 1983. Experts say this happened in part due to a racial reckoning - with the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and Floyd in the same year as the global Covid-19 pandemic.
Since his reelection, Trump has made the elimination of DEI programs a centerpiece of his administration, cracking down on diversity efforts in the federal government with a series of executive orders.
In January, the Defense Department's intelligence agency paused observances of cultural or historical annual events – like Juneteenth – in response to Trump's ban on diversity, equity and inclusion programs in the federal workplace, the Associated Press reported.
In a statement to CNN earlier this month, chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said the agency is 'proud of our warriors and their history,' but will focus 'on the character of their service instead of their immutable characteristics.'
'Our unity and purpose are instrumental to meeting the Department's warfighting mission. Efforts to divide the force – to put one group ahead of another – erode camaraderie and threaten mission execution,' Parnell added.
The impacts of the federal rollback of DEI practices have begun to trickle down to local communities. Several areas across the country have canceled or scaled back celebrations for the holiday, citing safety concerns, mixed feedback from the community and other issues.
Reggie Johnson, president of the NAACP Metuchen Edison Piscataway Area Branch in New Jersey, said he had to move his organization's annual Juneteenth celebration to a smaller location after staff at the federal site where it was previously held expressed uncertainty about hosting it.
'The contractors misinterpreted our event as a DEI initiative,' Johnson said. 'They didn't want to risk having it and losing it because of Trump's interpretation of Juneteenth.'
Five days later, Johnson said, federal staff called back to say the event would be allowed. But by then, he had already secured another space.
A museum in Fredericksburg, Virginia, had to scale back its Juneteenth celebration because it could no longer access its National Endowment for the Arts funding.
'Our Juneteenth Grant was officially 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 in an emailed statement this week. '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.'
While eliminating a federal holiday would require an act of Congress, experts warn that any dilution of the holiday celebration is cause for concern.
'Most Americans don't have a kind of deep knowledge of Juneteenth, but even that, what they know, will disappear,' Robert Bland, assistant professor of history and Africana studies at the University of Tennessee, said.
Blythewood, South Carolina, Mayor Sloan J. Griffin III was elected in 2023 to a town of about 4,772 people – being only the second Black person to do so.
This year, he was the only member of the town council to vote in favor of holding Juneteenth and Fourth of July events. In May, the town's Facebook page said the cancelations were 'due to safety concerns,' something that the mayor attributed to unprecedented population growth.
Blythewood recently had two incidents where teenagers were involved in fights, which led to an event being canceled. Griffin also noted that there was a recent shooting around 2 a.m., involving minors who were out after prom.
Still, Griffin said he knows how important the celebration of Juneteenth is and added that with his background in public safety he's used to coming up with multiple solutions to tackle a problem.
South Carolina is a state with a complex history when it comes to race. It's home to Charleston, one of the nation's top travel destinations, but also a city plagued by its sordid past built on the unpaid labor of African men and women who were kidnapped, beaten, raped and enslaved. The state was the site of one of the nation's most racially motivated attacks in recent history and was among the last to recognize Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a paid holiday.
'I was the one that really started the Juneteenth piece here,' the mayor said, noting he was a council member at the time and supported commemorating the holiday. 'When we talk about Juneteenth in the history of the heritage, it is important that we never we never forget the past … but we also embrace the future and regenerate that burning desire that our parents and grandparents had in the 60s, to change things.'
A former 2nd Ward alderman for the city of Plano, Illinois – the first city in the state to adopt Juneteenth as a holiday – agrees.
'I really think that it's an opportunity for us to tell our story, without being interrupted,' Jamal Williams said. 'We are now in 2025 and we're still talking about first, the first African American to do this … You know, we've been free for a long time.'
Williams says he was the first Black member of the city's council. His last day serving as an alderman was last month. For years, he's helped organize Juneteenth events in the Plano community, including one in 2022 that drew about 1,100 people.
That number dropped to less than half – roughly 500 people – in 2024, according to Williams. This year the former alderman decided not to hold an event in Plano after a lack of sponsors looking to participate – though he is supporting an event in nearby Yorkville, a few miles away.
'I got labeled as someone that only wanted to support the Black community, not necessarily the people in Ward 2, which I was elected to do,' Williams said.
Another Juneteenth-related event across state lines was also canceled, as Indy Juneteenth in Indianapolis announced it would pause its parade but still hold several events to observe the holiday. The event's executive director said he tried to explore other options to keep the parade going.
'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,' Executive Director James Webb told CNN.
An organization that typically hosts a Juneteenth event at a local park in Bend, Oregon, said it was postponing this year's celebration – citing growing racial tensions and threats.
And in Denver, the annual Juneteenth Music Festival was scaled back to a single-day event after several major sponsors either pulled out or reduced their contributions this year.
Norman Harris, the festival's lead organizer, said the loss of support was abrupt and came without a clear explanation.
Educators caution against conflating DEI with historical remembrances of holidays like Juneteenth.
'DEI efforts and historical remembrance celebrations are two totally different things,' inclusive leadership educator and scholar Toby S. Jenkins said. 'Fourth of July is not DEI, even though it celebrates freedom from political oppression. Memorial Day isn't DEI, even though it honors a protected population, our veterans.'
Still, some say the scaling back and cancelations of these events paints a picture of how much work still needs to be done.
'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,' Levy said.
'I would really just hope that Black people, wherever they are, use it as an opportunity to connect, to build, to plan, for our future like we've always had to do, and to return to those traditions and strategies and wisdom of our ancestors of what to do in these moments of repression and hate,' Levy added.
CNN's Nicquel Terry Ellis and Piper Hudspeth Blackburn contributed to this report.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Hill
13 minutes ago
- The Hill
Hogg's political group endorses Mamdani in NYC mayoral race
David Hogg's political group Leaders We Deserve is endorsing New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani ahead of Tuesday's Democratic primary. 'We are here talking to voters on the third day of early voting,' Mamdani said in a video posted on X after Mamdani and Hogg introduce themselves. 'And we're so excited to let them know that our campaign has just been endorsed by Leaders We Deserve.' 'We're really excited to support the campaign here to help make New York City affordable, help make sure that buses are faster and free at the same time and that no New Yorker has to pay for childcare,' Hogg says in the video. Mamdani is running in a crowded field for New York City mayor, with recent polling showing a tightening race, though former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) is shown in surveys still leading the pack. Mamdani and City Comptroller Brad Lander have cross-endorsed each other as a bid to make sure Cuomo doesn't come out ahead in the Tuesday contest. New York City uses ranked choice voting, meaning that voters rank their candidates in order of preference; if no candidate outright receives more than half of the vote, the candidate with the least votes is eliminated and any voters who place the eliminated candidate as their first pick then have the second-choice picks distributed. The process plays out until one candidate receives more than half of the vote. The Democratic candidates are each hoping to take on embattled Mayor Eric Adams, an independent, in the general election. Mamdani has previously touted Hogg on social media, sharing a photo of the two of them during his campaign earlier this week. Mamdani's endorsement came on the same day that Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.) announced he would be endorsing Cuomo, a noteworthy get as Cuomo courts Black voters in the city. Hogg's endorsement of Mamdani is his first one since he made the decision to forgo running for reelection as a Democratic National Committee vice chair amid controversy over his plans to back primary challengers to incumbents while serving as a DNC officer.
The Hill
13 minutes ago
- The Hill
Israel, Iran trade strikes as Trump weighs US military involvement
Israel and Iran traded strikes on Friday as President Trump weighs the possibility of U.S. involvement and European officials seek to revive nuclear negotiations with Tehran. Israel said it hit 60 Iranian aircrafts early Friday morning along with the headquarters of the Organization of Defensive Innovation and Research, which carries out nuclear weapons research, according to the Associated Press. Iranian media said Israel's strikes also hit the city of Rasht on the Caspian Sea early Friday. Reuters reported that at least one Iranian missile struck Beersheba, Israel's largest southern city, early Friday, ripping off the facade of at least one apartment complex and leaving a crater in a residential area. CNN reported it struck close to a tech park that houses a Microsoft office. Iran also struck near civilian sites in Haifa, injuring more than a dozen people and sending residents running for cover in a shopping mall, CNN reported. That followed an Iranian strike on Thursday that struck a hospital in Beersheba, wounding at least 80 patients and medical workers, according to Israeli officials. Israel's defense chief accused Iran of war crimes and said Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would be held accountable for the attack. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) launched overnight bombings in the heart of Tehran, along with the cities of Tabriz and Kermanshah, hitting 'missile storage and launch infrastructure components,' according to the AP. 'We are strengthening our air control in the region and advancing our air offensive,' Israeli military spokesperson Brig. Gen. Effie Defrin told reporters, according to the AP. 'We have more sites to strike in Tehran, western Iran and other places.' Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Steve Witkoff, Trump's special envoy to the Middle East, met with Britain's foreign secretary on Thursday to discuss diplomatic efforts to end the conflict. Iran's Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi is slated to meet with European leaders in Geneva to discuss a new nuclear deal. Iran earlier this month rejected U.S. proposals to effectively end its nuclear program, and move enrichment facilities outside the country. The White House on Thursday released a statement from President Trump saying he would decide within two weeks on whether to join Israel's war. Israel is pressuring the U.S. to deploy it's 'bunker buster' bombs on Iran's Fordo uranium enrichment facility, which is key to its nuclear program and buried deep inside a mountain. While Trump has been publicly non-committal on resuming talks with Tehran, Araghci said Thursday the U.S. is pushing for diplomacy behind the scenes. 'It is the Americans who want talks,' he said, according to AP. 'They've sent messages several times — very serious ones — but we made it explicitly clear to them that as long as this aggression and invasion continue, there is absolutely no room for talk or diplomacy. We are engaged in legitimate self-defense, and this defense will not stop under any circumstances.' Earlier this week, Trump urged civilians to evacuate Tehran immediately, as the U.S. ordered a third U.S. Navy destroyer to the eastern portion of the Mediterranean Sea. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, speaking near the damaged Beersheba hospital, said he trusted that Trump would 'do what's best for America.' 'I can tell you that they're already helping a lot,' he added.
Yahoo
16 minutes ago
- Yahoo
An inflation surge could swamp Trump's presidency. This one investment will keep your money safe.
America's financial outlook has darkened under President Donald Trump's leadership. All three major credit-rating agencies now rank U.S. federal debt one notch below triple-A, and Jamie Dimon, the chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase JPM, has warned of a crack in the U.S. bond market. With the 10-year U.S. Treasury yield BX:TMUBMUSD10Y at 4.4% on Wednesday and the 30-year rate BX:TMUBMUSD30Y at 4.9%, holders of nominal U.S. debt should be prepared for significant real losses. The principal risk is not U.S. sovereign default, but rather unexpected increases in medium- and long-term interest rates, owing to market expectations of higher inflation. Fiscal policy under Trump is unsustainable, as it was under former President Joe Biden — but even more so if the Trump administration's 'big, beautiful' budget passes in anything like its current form. 'I'm at my wit's end': My niece paid off her husband's credit card but fell behind on her taxes. How can I help her? Why the biggest-ever 'triple witching' options expiration could deliver a jolt to Friday's trading Israel-Iran clash delivers a fresh shock to investors. History suggests this is the move to make. 'I prepaid our mom's rent for a year': My sister is a millionaire and never helps our mother. How do I cut her out of her will? I'm 75 and have a reverse mortgage. Should I pay it off with my $200K savings — and live off Social Security instead? The January 2025 Financial Report of the United States Government makes this clear. The U.S. ratio of federal debt held by the public to GDP at the end of the 2024 fiscal year was around 98%, although $4.7 trillion of the $28.3 trillion in federal debt was held by the Federal Reserve — meaning it is erroneously categorized as held by the 'public,' when really the central bank's accounts should be consolidated with those of the federal government. Under current policy and based on the report's assumptions, federal debt held by the public would reach 535% of GDP by 2099. Stabilizing the U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio requires that the annual primary federal deficit (excluding interest payments) fall by an average of 4.3% of GDP over the next 75 years. And yet, the federal deficit and primary deficit were 6.4% and 3.3% of GDP, respectively, in fiscal-year 2024 — far above what can be justified with the economy near full employment. Read: America's debt is at a breaking point — Trump's tax bill might just push it over the edge With the U.S. Congress so dysfunctional, no one has any faith that it will deliver the required deficit reduction. Democrats do not do permanent spending cuts, and Republicans do not do permanent tax increases. The federal government does own about 28% of U.S. land (roughly 640 million acres), as well as other real commercial assets that could yield significant additional nontax revenues if properly managed. But neither party — nor even the misnamed Department of Government Efficiency — appears to have considered this option, so the federal deficit as a share of GDP is likely to rise over the next few years. With no foreseeable improvement in fiscal policy, there are two possible outcomes. First, the U.S. government could default. There has long been a small, but recurrent, risk of a technical, short-lived default if Congress fails to raise, suspend, extend, revise or abolish the federal debt ceiling on time. Fortunately, it has averted this scenario 78 times since 1960, and we expect it to continue doing so. As matters stand, the debt ceiling (including debt held by federal agencies) is set at $36.1 trillion, and debt subject to the limit is also $36.1 trillion. If needed, the Treasury has a highly liquid asset (the Treasury General Account held with the Fed) worth $332.9 billion that it can use to meet its obligations, and it may temporarily use 'extraordinary measures to continue to borrow additional amounts for a limited time.' The second, more likely possibility is that the Fed will monetize enough federal debt to prevent default. Since U.S. federal debt is serviced in dollars, 'printing money' is always an option. But, as the Fed well knows, a large-scale monetization of federal debt would result in significantly above-target inflation. We believe the Fed will do this without its operational independence being revoked by Trump. To get the Federal Open Market Committee to do something it does not want to do, the president would need to control the majority of its 12 voting members. These include the seven members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors and five (out of 12) regional Federal Reserve Bank presidents who vote at any given FOMC meeting. Neither the president nor Congress can appoint or fire Federal Reserve Bank presidents. The Board of Governors must approve them, and only the board can remove them. The president nominates board members, but the Senate must confirm them. Board members' current term limits imply that, assuming none are fired, Trump will have the opportunity to nominate only two new members. True, with the power to fire board members 'for cause' — meaning 'inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance' — Trump could try to replace a majority of the members with loyalists. But this seems unlikely. Whether the 'for cause' criterion has been met will be contested in the courts, and the Senate would have to confirm Trump's appointees. Read: Trump's pick to replace Fed Chair Powell could rock your mortgage and retirement. Buckle up. Similarly, Congress could revise the Federal Reserve Act to replace the Fed's monetary-policy objectives with a mandate to buy or sell sovereign debt according to the wishes of the Treasury. But this, too, is unlikely. And the same goes for a scenario in which the Treasury sets a rapidly depreciating exchange-rate target for the dollar DXY that can be achieved only through large-scale Fed purchases of U.S. public debt that generate high inflation. However, fiscal dominance — indeed, fiscal capture — is very likely, because the need to avoid a domestic and global financial crisis will force the FOMC's hand. It will do whatever is necessary to prevent a U.S. government default, because the Fed's financial-stability mandate (the Financial Stability Act of 2010 mentions the Fed 179 times) undoubtedly trumps its monetary-policy mandate of maintaining maximum employment, stable prices and moderate long-term interest rates. The Fed cannot credibly threaten to refuse to monetize debt and deficits to compel fiscal retrenchment by the Treasury, let alone Congress. Thus, the Fed will have no choice but to engage in sovereign-debt purchases that it knows to be incompatible with its monetary-policy objectives. With nominal interest rates for medium- and long-term U.S. sovereign debt far below the levels consistent with realistic expectations of future inflation, serious capital losses on nominal debt instruments (public and private) are likely. The inflation surge could be no more than three years away. As the prospect of fiscal capture comes into view, investing in Treasury inflation-protected securities (TIPS) and other indexed public and private debt instruments will become increasingly attractive. Willem H. Buiter, a former chief economist at Citibank and former member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England, is an independent economic adviser. Anne C. Sibert is professor emerita of economics at Birkbeck, University of London. This commentary — 'U.S. Debt Holders Should Brace for Impact' — is published with the permission of Project Syndicate. Read: 'You are going to panic,' Jamie Dimon tells regulators about what will happen when the bond market cracks More: What's at stake if world's most powerful market finally buckles after decades-long U.S. debt splurge 20 companies in the S&P 500 whose investors have gained the greatest rewards from stock buybacks Israel-Iran conflict poses three challenges for stocks that could slam market by up to 20%, warns RBC I'm 51, earn $129K and have $165K in my 401(k). Can I afford to retire when my husband, 59, draws Social Security at 62? 'It might be another Apple or Microsoft': My wife invested $100K in one stock and it exploded 1,500%. Do we sell? Why the stock market will be performing a high-wire act over the summer, according to UBS
