With legislation recently signed by Gov. Janet Mills, Maine will have a 13th paid state holiday – Juneteenth. And it’s one of just five, along with Veterans Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s, to be celebrated each year on the same date.
The new holiday recognizes the moment on June 19, 1865, when U.S. Major Gen. Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, to announce that, by executive order, “all slaves are free.”
The news spread quickly among the newly liberated, but it’s another irony of this nation’s much-contested history that the order wasn’t delivered until two months after the Confederate surrender at Appomattox, and more than two years after Abraham Lincoln’s first emancipation proclamation.
Nor was Juneteenth widely known until relatively recently. In 1979, Texas – then under different management – became the first state to recognize it, in 1979, and the first to make it a state holiday the following year.
Recently, three more states – New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia – proclaimed a holiday, and Maine is likely to be joined by at least a half dozen more by 2022. Congress may also act soon.
It seems a fitting occasion, a year after the death of George Floyd, to recognize a moment of national liberation that, in retrospect, touched off another century and a half of struggle to define what that liberation might mean.
At first, it did not create a right to vote, equal status for women, or equal access to public programs, though we’ve now traveled some distance toward all those goals – not without controversy, however.
Rep. Rachel Talbot Ross’s Juneteenth bill, L.D. 183, may not be her most substantive achievement of the session, but at least symbolically, it represents a sea change that may be unfolding all around us.
Rachel Talbot Ross Gregory Rec/Staff Photographer
Another Talbot Ross bill, L.D. 2, requiring racial impact statements for future legislation, was among the first bills signed this year.
But it’s the Permanent Commission on the Status of Racial, Indigenous and Tribal Populations, which Talbot Ross chairs, that may be the most important.
The commission barely made it into law in 2019, and, like every other state board and agency, was hamstrung by pandemic conditions. Now, however, it will have funding and an executive director, and undoubtedly a lot of work to do.
It’s the kind of cross-cultural study commission so rare in states like Maine, with small minority populations, but its significance may grow with time. It’s expected to help lead next year, when L.D. 1626, proposing major revisions to the 1980 Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act, is finally debated.
And, if other bills still pending are enacted, it will be tasked with studying disparities in access to prenatal care, and to agricultural land and grants, as well as evaluating prospects for restorative justice.
Talbot Ross is the first person of color to serve in legislative leadership, and, briefly, was the only one currently in office.
But Craig Hickman, who’d been term-limited in the House, won a special Senate election in March. He moved smoothly into the Senate chair of the Labor and Housing Committee, and is the first person of color to chair two different legislative committees.
Not everyone is quite as prepared for electoral success. Nasreen Sheikh-Yousef was the top vote-getter June 8 among those running for four at-large positions on the new Portland City Charter Commission.
The commission will meet over the next year, with its most important task resolving the question of who runs Portland – the city manager, or the full-time mayor created through a 2008 charter commission.
Election night is normally devoted to thanking supporters and pledging to honor the will of the voters. At 1 a.m., however, Sheikh-Yousef tweeted quite a different message, telling Jon Jennings, the current manager, “We are going to make you the last white supremacist city manager. We are coming!”
As was quickly pointed out, Jennings is already leaving in 2022, and nothing the charter commission recommends could be adopted before the 2023 mayoral election, but that didn’t seem to be the point.
After some immediate online criticism, Sheikh-Yousef responded by tweeting six times, “Jon Jennings is a white supremacist!” and then fell silent.
Commentary since then has been muted, but it’s doubtful that dealing with white supremacy, if it exists in the government of Maine’s largest city, is going to be advanced by personalizing the problem and denouncing individuals.
There’s important work ahead for the Portland charter commission, as there is for the Legislature. In the end, writing better laws, and better charters of government, is the only way we have to peacefully, and successfully, achieve what’s needed.
Douglas Rooks has been a Maine editor, commentator, reporter and author since 1984. His new book is “First Franco: Albert Beliveau in Law, Politics and Love.” Visit his website, douglasrooks.weebly.com or e-mail: drooks@tds.net
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