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Atlantic
4 days ago
- Politics
- Atlantic
The Hollowness of This Juneteenth
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Five years ago, as the streets ran hot and the body of George Floyd lay cold, optimistic commentators believed that America was on the verge of a breakthrough in its eternal deliberation over the humanity of Black people. For a brief moment, perhaps, it seemed as if the ' whirlwinds of revolt,' as Martin Luther King Jr. once prophesied, had finally shaken the foundations of the nation. In 2021, in the midst of this 'racial reckoning,' as it was often called, Congress passed legislation turning Juneteenth into 'Juneteenth National Independence Day,' a federal holiday. Now we face the sober reality that our country might be further away from that promised land than it has been in decades. Along with Memorial Day and Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Juneteenth became one of three federal holidays with explicit roots in Black history. Memorial Day was made a national observance in 1868 to honor soldiers felled during the Civil War, and was preceded by local celebrations organized by newly freed Black residents. The impetus for MLK Day came about with King's assassination exactly a century later, after which civil-rights groups and King's closest associates campaigned for the named holiday. Memorial Day and Martin Luther King Jr. Day both originated in times when the Black freedom struggle faced its greatest challenges. Juneteenth—an emancipation celebration popularized during Reconstruction—was codified during what purported to be a transformation in America's racial consciousness. But, like its predecessors, Juneteenth joined the federal-holiday ranks just as Americans also decided en masse that they were done with all that. The 1870s saw the radical promise of Reconstruction give way to Jim Crow; the 1960s gave way to the nihilism and race-baiting of the Nixonian and Reaganite years. In 2024, the election of Donald Trump to a second term signaled a national retreat from racial egalitarianism. In his first months as president, he has moved the country in that direction more quickly than many imagined he would. Trump has set fire to billions of dollars of contracts in the name of eliminating 'DEI,' according to the White House. His legislative agenda threatens to strip federal health care and disaster aid for populations that are disproportionately Black. The Department of Defense has defenestrated Black veterans in death, removing their names from government websites and restoring the old names of bases that originally honored Confederate officers. The Federal Aviation Administration plans to spend millions of dollars to investigate whether recruiting Black air-traffic controllers (among other minority groups) has caused more plane crashes. The Smithsonian and its constituents have come under attack for daring to present artifacts about slavery and segregation. Books about Black history are being disappeared from schools and libraries. The secretary of education has suggested that public-school lessons about the truth of slavery and Jim Crow might themselves be illegal. There were, perhaps, other possible outcomes after 2020, but they didn't come to pass. The Democratic Party harnessed King's whirlwinds of revolt to power its mighty machine, promising to transform America and prioritize racial justice. Corporations donned the mask of 'wokeness'; people sent CashApp 'reparations' and listened and learned. But the donations to racial-justice initiatives soon dried up. The party supported a war in Gaza that fundamentally undercut any claim to its moral authority, especially among many young Black folks who felt kinship with the Palestinians in their plight. When DEI emerged as a boogeyman on the far right, many corporate leaders and politicians started to slink away from previous commitments to equity. Democratic Party leadership underestimated the anti-anti-racism movement, and seemed to genuinely believe that earned racial progress would endure on its own. The backlash that anybody who'd studied history said would come came, and the country was unprepared. Trump and his allies spend a lot of time talking about indoctrination and banning DEI. But by and large, the campaign against 'wokeness' has always been a canard. The true quarries of Trump's movement are the actual policies and structures that made progress possible. Affirmative action is done, and Black entrance rates at some selective schools have already plummeted. Our existing federal protections against discrimination in workplaces, housing, health care, and pollution are being peeled back layer by layer. The 1964 Civil Rights Act might be a dead letter, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act is in perpetual danger of losing the last of its teeth. The Fourteenth Amendment itself stands in tatters. Five years after Democratic congresspeople knelt on the floor in kente cloth for nearly nine minutes, the holiday is all that really remains. This puts the oddness of today in stark relief. The purpose of Juneteenth was always a celebration of emancipation, of the Black community's emergence out of our gloomy past. But it was also an implicit warning that what had been done could be done again. Now millions of schoolchildren will enjoy a holiday commemorating parts of our history that the federal government believes might be illegal to teach them about. I once advocated for Juneteenth as a national holiday, on the grounds that the celebration would prompt more people to become familiar with the rich history of emancipation and Black folks' agency in that. But, as it turns out, transforming Juneteenth into 'Juneteenth National Independence Day' against the backdrop of the past few years of retrenchment simply creates another instance of hypocrisy. What we were promised was a reckoning, whatever that meant. What we got was a day off.
Yahoo
11-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Houston to unite MLK parades in 2026
HOUSTON (KIAH) — Big changes are coming to Houston's annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebrations. Starting in 2026, the city will host one unified MLK parade instead of two separate events. Mayor John Whitmire made the announcement Tuesday at City Hall, calling it a historic step forward after more than three decades of efforts to bring the parades together. The change follows months of discussions between the Mayor's Office, City Council, and parade organizers, including the Black Heritage Society. Previous efforts to unify the parades, including those by former Mayor Sylvester Turner, were unsuccessful. The new "Unity MLK Parade" is scheduled for January 19, 2026. The City of Houston says additional details will be released in the coming weeks.
Yahoo
13-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Arkansas Martin Luther King, Jr. Commission launches statewide Operation Appreciation food giveaway
Video: Arkansas MLK Jr. Commission holds several events on Martin Luther King Jr. Day LITTLE ROCK, Ark. – The Arkansas Martin Luther King, Jr. Commission is launching a program to fight statewide food insecurity during the summer months. The commission announced the launch of its Operation Appreciation Food Giveaway at 11 a.m. on May 27 at the commission's offices at 906 Broadway in Little Rock. Arkansas Martin Luther King, Jr. Commission executive director honored with key to the city of Las Vegas Community members are encouraged to arrive early, as supplies are distributed on a first-come, first-served basis. Volunteers will be on hand to assist with loading food items. 'Summer should be a time of joy and growth for our children, not a time of hunger,' Commission Executive Director DuShun Scarbrough said. 'Through Operation Appreciation, we're not only providing food, we're showing families that their community sees them, values them, and is committed to supporting them.' Officials said the kickoff food giveaway is one of several being organized in communities statewide, with partners including local nonprofits, faith-based organizations, schools, and volunteers working together to identify needs and ensure distribution. Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders launches summer program to provide groceries for families For more information, contact director Scarbrough at 888-290-KING or by email. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Boston Globe
11-04-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
Maine Governor Janet Mills, staring down Trump, says she is unfazed by ‘loud men'
The ensuing clash between the two leaders, over a Maine anti-discrimination law that allows transgender athletes to participate in girls' and women's sports, has escalated steadily since then. After Trump threatened that day to cut off funding for Maine, and Mills shot back, 'See you in court,' she has not budged from her stance: that complying with the president's executive order barring transgender women from women's sports would violate the Maine law. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up While she has stood firm, the federal government has barraged the state with investigations, declared its education system to be in violation of federal law and frozen some of its funding. Advertisement The Department of Education has set Friday as a final deadline for Maine to comply with the president's order. If it does not, the agency plans to hand the matter over to the Department of Justice for enforcement. Neither side shows any sign of backing down. Maine sued the Trump administration Monday, doubling down on its defiance as it began the legal fight that Mills promised at the White House. Advertisement At a time when resistance to Trump has largely seemed muted by fears of retribution, Mills, a relative moderate who has never sought the national limelight, seemed unlikely to emerge as one of his boldest challengers. But to people who have watched her political ascent -- from the state's first female district attorney to its first female attorney general and governor -- and to some who have sparred with her over thorny issues -- the governor's refusal to bow to Trump is not surprising. Mills, 77, had a combative relationship with Paul LePage, the divisive two-term Republican governor who preceded her in office. LePage outraged Democrats by denying climate change and opposing same-sex marriage, attempting to roll back child labor laws and refusing to attend Martin Luther King Jr. Day events. In 2017, LePage sued Mills, then the state's attorney general, for refusing to represent him in court. She campaigned for governor in 2018 on her pledge to expand the state's Medicaid program, a change LePage had fought even after voters overwhelmingly approved it. 'She's entered a lot of battles, and if you go at her, she will not back down,' said Ethan Strimling, a Democrat and former mayor of Portland who served with Mills in the Maine Legislature in the early 2000s. 'She's going to go toe-to-toe,' Strimling said. 'She's always been like that.' As a district attorney early in her career, Mills sought new ways to stamp out abusive behavior. Her official biography notes that she grew frustrated with the courts for failing to protect battered women and co-founded the Maine Women's Lobby to advocate for them. She has described her own experience as a young woman with an alcoholic boyfriend who once held a loaded gun to her head. (She promptly left him.) Advertisement Raised in rural western Maine, closer to the state's rugged mountains than its wandering coastline, Mills grew up in a family of politically connected Republicans. Her father, Peter Mills, served in the Legislature, and as the United States attorney for Maine in the 1950s. One of her brothers served in the Legislature as well, and her younger sister was the longtime director of Maine's public health agency. Rejecting a more traditional path, Janet Mills dropped out of Colby College, her parents' alma mater, to spend the 1967 'Summer of Love' in San Francisco, and then moved to Boston, enrolled in the University of Massachusetts and studied abroad at the Sorbonne in Paris. Energized by movements for women's and civil rights, she became a Democrat. Back in Maine, she worked on Sen. Edward M. Kennedy's doomed 1980 campaign for president and won her own race for district attorney. In an interview this month in Farmington, Mills' hometown, her brother Paul Mills recalled how their father pushed civil rights legislation in the late 1960s, after learning that a club in Portland had excluded Jewish members. Their father, he said, was a lot like Janet Mills. 'He had a similarly principled temperament,' Paul Mills said. 'He spoke his own mind, and he could be unrelenting.' Her roots in conservative Franklin County, which Trump won in each of the past three presidential elections, help explain why Mills has been politically moderate on some issues, most notably gun rights. That positioning has helped her succeed in a divided state, while sometimes disappointing liberal and progressive voters, many of whom hoped she would propose aggressive new gun control measures after a 2023 mass shooting in Lewiston by an Army Reservist whose unraveling mental health had raised alarms. Advertisement Mills allowed a new law to take effect requiring a 72-hour waiting period for gun purchases, but said she felt 'deeply conflicted' about it. She vetoed a ban on bump stocks -- add-on devices that let semi-automatic rifles fire more rapidly -- and said she did not want hunters to lose options. Mills opted not to push for Maine to adopt a 'red flag' law, which would allow people to petition a court to take away guns from a relative whom they considered to be dangerous. Gun control advocates are seeking a statewide vote on a red flag law in November. The governor's feud with Trump has raised her profile across the country -- fans now wear 'See you in court' T-shirts -- and has intensified feelings about her at home. 'When I saw it on TV, I thought, 'Yep, that's Janet Mills,'' said Elayne Richard, a 71-year-old Democrat in Fairfield, Maine, who supports the governor. 'My first reaction was, 'I'm so proud she did that,' because no one else had the gumption.' But in a state where 46% of voters supported Trump, many people are livid about Mills' stance. Roseanna Young, 52, of Edgecomb, a Republican who believes transgender women should not play on women's sports teams, called the governor 'an embarrassment.' 'We're the laughingstock of the United States,' she said. Mills has been adamant that her resistance is not about the issue of transgender women in sports, per se, but about upholding Maine law and fulfilling her duty to defend it. She maintains that the state's human rights law -- which prohibits discrimination based on gender identity as well as religion, race and other factors -- can be changed only by the Legislature, not by anyone's executive order. She has not expressed her own views on transgender women athletes publicly, although she has said the issue was 'worthy of a debate.' Advertisement Katrina Smith, the assistant leader of the Republican minority in the Maine House of Representatives, said Mills had made the state's financial position precarious by putting its federal funding at risk, given the state's budget problems, high energy costs, property tax burdens and household incomes below the national median. Republican legislators have introduced several proposals to change the anti-discrimination law, including some compromises, Smith said, but Democrats have not scheduled hearings to discuss them. 'We're ready, and this could be done in a week,' she said. 'It kind of lays at her feet. Everyone's got their bristles up, but someone's got to be the adult and come to the table.' Because of the state's refusal to comply with Trump's order, the U.S. Department of Agriculture imposed a funding freeze that the state said could threaten free meals for schoolchildren. Attorney General Pam Bondi cut funds for Maine prisons this week because the state was housing a transgender woman in a women's prison, she told Fox News. Leland Dudek, the acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration, acknowledged that he tried to punish Mills by briefly cutting off Maine's access to a program that makes it easier for parents to request Social Security numbers for their children. Advertisement 'I was ticked at the governor of Maine for not being real cordial to the president,' Dudek said in a recent interview. Trump demanded in late March that Mills issue a 'full throated apology.' She lashed back instead, challenging his claims that he was protecting women by policing women's sports. 'If the current occupant of the White House wants to protect women and girls, he should start by protecting the women and teenage girls who are suffering miscarriages and dying because they can't get basic, lifesaving health care,' she said at an event in Bangor. 'He should talk about the little girls and boys and infants in Sudan and other countries who are dying right now because he has cut off their supply of food and lifesaving medicines.' Mills, who is term-limited, will leave office next year. That could ease the friction between Maine and the White House -- or not. The first Democrat to announce plans to run for governor was Shenna Bellows, Maine's secretary of state, who tried unsuccessfully last year to exclude Trump from Maine's primary ballot. This article originally appeared in .
Yahoo
31-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
When is Cesar Chávez Day? Are banks, USPS closed? Why the holiday is celebrated
César Chávez Day is Monday, honoring the late Mexican American civil rights activist who dedicated his life to advocating for farmworkers' rights, fair wages, and better working conditions. The holiday is a federal commemorative holiday that former President Barack Obama proclaimed in 2014 to be observed annually on March 31, which falls on the birthday of the late Chávez, who died in April 1993. Chávez was a civil rights leader and labor activist who co-founded the United Farm Workers to advocate for better wages and working conditions for farm laborers. He played a key role in organizing nonviolent protests, strikes and boycotts to improve the rights of agricultural workers, particularly in California and other farming regions. Before former President Obama proclaimed César Chávez Day a federal commemorative holiday in 2014, the NAACP and other advocacy groups urged him to designate it as a paid federal holiday. They cited Obama's past support for the effort, including a statement he made before issuing the proclamation. "Chavez left a legacy as an educator, environmentalist, and a civil rights leader. And his cause lives on as farm workers and laborers across America continue to struggle for fair treatment and fair wages," Obama said at the time. "We find strength in what Cesar Chavez accomplished so many years ago. And we should honor him for what he's taught us about making America a stronger, more just and more prosperous nation. That's why I support the call to make Cesar Chavez's birthday a national holiday. It's time to recognize the contributions of this American icon to the ongoing efforts to perfect our union." However, it was not designated a paid federal holiday. Although César Chávez Day is a federal commemorative holiday, it is not one of the 11 federally recognized holidays that require government offices to close. As a result, banks, the U.S. Postal Service, and most federal offices remain open. However, some state and local offices in California and Arizona may close in observance of the holiday, due to Chávez's strong ties to both states. There are typically only 11 federal holidays when federal offices and agencies close, but this year included Inauguration Day. While federal law does not require private companies to observe any federal holidays, many businesses and schools choose to offer time off or holiday pay throughout the year for these observances. César Chávez Day is not generally included. Inauguration Day, which took place on Jan. 20, is not part of the regular 11 federal holidays, but because it aligned with Martin Luther King Jr. Day, most American workers had the day off. Here's a list of the federal holidays in 2025: Jan. 1, 2025 – New Year's Day Jan. 20, 2025 – Birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. Jan. 20, 2025 – Inauguration Day Feb. 17, 2025 – Washington's Birthday (Presidents' Day) May 26, 2025 – Memorial Day June 19, 2025 – Juneteenth National Independence Day July 4, 2025 – Independence Day Sept. 1, 2025 – Labor Day Oct. 13, 2025 – Indigenous People's Day Nov. 11, 2025 – Veterans Day Nov. 27, 2025 – Thanksgiving Day Dec. 25, 2025 – Christmas Day This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: When is Cesar Chávez Day 2025? Are banks, USPS closed?
