Well we’ve already gone further down this rabbit hole than I intended.
I still think June 19 makes little sense.
From a historical accuracy perspective, it should be December 6 (the day the US Government banned slavery throughout lands governed by the US.)
From a practical perspective, April 16 is already a legal holiday in part of the country and is recognized by the IRS so therefore already affects all Americans and falls during a holiday drought rather than extremely close to two unrelated holidays. So three good practical reasons if you dislike December 6 for practical reasons.
A third date to consider would be when slavery was done away with on tribal lands, which was on a Chocktaw reservation in 1866 although I don’t know the date off the top of my head. But that’s messy in that it potentially pits one racial minority against another, so probably isn’t the best idea, IMO.
If we’re talking about accuracy of Holiday date correlating with the event you probably are pretty upset about Christmas given that scholars agree that from the accounts of His birth in the Bible it most likely was spring or summer, not December.
Or Thanksgiving being at the end of November instead of October.
December 25 was chosen because it was a (much more popular and widely celebrated) Pagan holiday and the church made a deliberate decision to compete with the Pagans.
They obviously won the competition.
Should Christ’s birth continue to be celebrated on December 25? It’s not like we have an alternative date that makes sense on which to celebrate, and at this point we’ve been celebrating it on December 25 for 1,684 years.
(2021 will be 1,685 years)
If we were in the year 3,076 and someone was proposing moving the day we celebrate the end of slavery after 1,684 years of doing it on June 19 then I’d almost certainly feel differently.
Canadian Thanksgiving makes far more sense, date-wise, than the US. No arguments there. I’d be happy to move it. That said, it’s been a legal holiday in November for well over 100 years now, so there’s something to be said for leaving it alone.
From my quick googling it seems April 16 is only recognized in DC. June 19 had a resolution of Congress recognizing it in 1997. By the late 80s it was celebrated in many states across the us. Virginia, New Jersey, and New York have it as an official state holiday now.
It was referenced in Blackish and Atlanta 4 years ago. iOS calendars had it listed since 2018.
My point was April 16 is considerably worse as a date than June 19th.
Your reasoning against June 19 was that it was a Texas thing. April 16 is only a DC thing. That’s it. And they don’t even have any senators so why should I care about their opinion on national matters? The only reason people outside of DC may know about it is once every seven years the tax deadline is moved to Monday instead of Friday. Whereas the original Texas date was officially recognized by Congress in the 90s, multiple other states officially in 2020, in celebrations for decades across multiple cities (200 cities per wiki), and recognized in pop culture as the date to celebrate. Seems like we should go with the more broadly recognized one than deciding to use a date because it affected my tax filing deadline once.
Juneteenth will be a Washington state holiday beginning in 2022. But 6/19/2022 is a Sunday. Which means it will actually be celebrated for the first time June 20th 2022.
Just another holiday that I’ll have to work… Do most insurers recognize bank holidays? We do Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving & Christmas. We also do the Friday after Thanksgiving, and Christmas Eve some years depending on what day of the week it falls.
Sometimes I take off MLK day bc Mr aj is usually off and it’s close to our anniversary. Is it bad that I don’t go to any parades on that day? January is too cold for parades. But I will often read or watch his I Have a Dream speech sometime near that day.
My company recognizes those, we don’t get presidents’ day off but we do get MLK Jr day. We also get a day off for voting, and we haven’t declared Juneteenth a holiday yet but there is a company party so we kinda get the afternoon off. But I don’t work in insurance, I’m at a health tech startup type of place that’s privately held.