The Boston Red Sox celebrated Juneteenth last night before their game against the New York Yankees, but did they really need to?
Part of Boston’s festivities involved having Juneteenth flag designer Ben Haith throw out the ceremonial first pitch while he and several others wore jerseys that bore parts of the flag’s design.
As we honor Juneteenth, we thank everyone who joined us last night for a special game celebrating the history and bringing communities together at Fenway.
— Red Sox (@RedSox) June 19, 2023
Thank you to Ben Haith, the creator of the Juneteenth flag, for serving as our ceremonial first pitch! pic.twitter.com/MDLAN6n4XE
“It feels like I’m living in a miracle,” Haith said. “It wasn’t always comfortable for me to come to Fenway Park, because sometimes I would hear people called names. But things have changed and it’s like a miracle.”
But that doesn’t really tell us a lot about this day in June that became a federal holiday in 2021. What exactly are we supposed to be celebrating?
"Juneteenth," a day that has been honored by black Americans for over a hundred years, marks the day in 1865 when slavery was abolished in Texas, when the vision laid out in the Emancipation Proclamation was finally fulfilled across all of the states (Texas has also held Juneteenth an official state holiday since 1979).
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This actually seems pretty logical. Black people have celebrated that day for quite some time because it was the day when the last state that legalized slavery abolished the practice. That's perfectly fine - some days have more significance to certain regional or ethnic groups than others. Another example of this would be how Massachusetts celebrates Patriots Day, while no one else in America does.
But the problem with the holiday is the progressive undertones that flow beneath the celebrations. After all, Black Lives Matter (BLM) was the group that started the calls for the day to be made a federal holiday in the first place. It forces us to posture to the left’s definition of when slavery was officially over, while forgetting many other dates that were significant in this struggle.
Focusing only on June 19th, 1865 shifts the focus from events such as Abraham Lincoln’s speech that decreed the slaves to be free in the first place, and it glosses over the conflict that had to happen before the event in Texas.
If today can be celebrated, why aren't January 1 (the date of Lincoln’s decree) and April 9 (the end of the Civil War) also federal holidays? Why does June 19 have to be put in an upper echelon of important dates? We focus on one day in the aftermath of the war as opposed to honoring those who led our nation through and lost their lives in the conflict itself.
On an intellectual level, black people celebrating this date makes sense, and I support it. But making it a federal holiday for the sake of woke posturing is downright wrong, and sports teams organizing events like what the Red Sox did on Sunday night makes it worse.
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