[[link removed]]

HOW CITIES ARE SCALING BACK JUNETEENTH CELEBRATIONS AFTER TRUMP-ERA
DEI ROLLBACKS  
[[link removed]]


 

Michelle Watson
June 18, 2025
CNN
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Organizers say safety issues along with mounting resistance to
diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives are making it harder to
hold events _

A woman holds an image of George Floyd during Juneteenth events in
New York City on June 19, 2020, Photograph: Eduardo Muñoz/Reuters

 

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.
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] tried
to take credit for making Juneteenth
[[link removed]] “very
famous,” saying
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] President
Joe Biden’s administration – the first holiday to be approved
[[link removed]] since
Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 1983. Experts say this happened in part
due to a racial pandemic - 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.

Pentagon intelligence agency halts cultural observances, citing DEI
restrictions

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
[[link removed]].

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
[[link removed]] 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 [[link removed]] of
history and Africana studies at the University of Tennessee, said.

Cancelations across the country

Blythewood, South Carolina, Mayor Sloan J. Griffin III was elected
in 2023 to a town of about
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] 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.

[Blythewood, South Carolina Mayor Sloan J. Griffin III]

Blythewood, South Carolina Mayor Sloan J. Griffin III   WACH

“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
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] growing
racial tensions and threats.

And in Denver, the annual Juneteenth Music Festival was scaled back
[[link removed]] to
a single-day event after several major sponsors either pulled out or
reduced their contributions this year.

[DENVER, CO - JUNE 17: Crowds gather along Welton Street in Five
Points for the Juneteenth Music Festival on June 17, 2017 in Denver,
Colorado. Organizers say its one of Denver's longest running parades
dating back to the 1950's where "nearly 3,000 people march to honor
the struggles and social progress achieved through marches and
demonstrations organized for freedom, justice, and equality in our
country's history".]

Crowds gather along Welton Street in Five Points for the Juneteenth
Music Festival on June 17, 2017 in Denver, Colorado. Organizers say
its one of Denver's longest running parades dating back to the 1950's
where "nearly 3,000 people march to honor the struggles and social
progress achieved through marches and demonstrations organized for
freedom, justice, and equality in our country's history". Kathryn
Scott/Denver Post/Getty Images

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._

* Juneteenth
[[link removed]]
* resistance
[[link removed]]
* Trump
[[link removed]]
* anti-DEI campaign
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]