Between Black Texas history, Pan-African diaspora, and a country still figuring out who a holiday is for, the most honest conversation about Juneteenth has barely begun
In Greenville, South Carolina, in 2022, a newly formed organization called Juneteenth GVL hung banners throughout downtown to promote their Juneteenth celebration. The banners depicted couples from various racial backgrounds, Black, Asian, Hispanic, and white. The backlash was immediate. Community members and rival organizers called the banners an act of “whitewashing,” a visual statement that dilutes a Black holiday by centering non-Black faces. The organization’s founder, himself Black, stood by the decision, saying the banners were designed to reflect unity in a divided city. “We did not want to make this exclusively Black,” said founder Reuben Hays. “That is not in the spirit of unity.”
One controversy. Two entirely coherent positions. And underneath both of them, a question that nobody has fully answered, even four years into Juneteenth’s existence as a federal holiday: who does this holiday belong to? Who is it for? And what happens to its meaning depending on how you answer those questions?
This is the conversation that the mainstream coverage of Juneteenth consistently sidesteps, the internal and external debates about ownership, expansion, cultural specificity, and diaspora solidarity that live underneath the festival stages and the federal proclamations. It is also, arguably, the most important conversation the holiday needs to have.
The Specific Story at the Root
Before engaging the debate about who Juneteenth belongs to, it is worth being precise about what Juneteenth actually is at its historical root, because the specificity matters to every argument that follows.
Juneteenth is not, in its origins, a Pan-African holiday. It is not a celebration of Black liberation generally. It is the commemoration of one specific event: June 19, 1865, in Galveston, Texas, when Union General Gordon Granger read General Order No. 3, informing approximately 250,000 enslaved people in Texas that they were free, two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation had already legally declared them so. It is a Texas story. It is a Black American story. And it is a story rooted in a very particular injustice: the deliberate withholding of freedom by enslavers who knew the law and chose to defy it.
Juneteenth commemorates the emancipation of enslaved African Americans on June 19, 1865, in Galveston, Texas. As a celebration, Juneteenth is not rooted in a particular political ideology but instead marks a specific historical event, a story of self-emancipation, a testament to the resilience, courage, and unwavering pursuit of freedom by enslaved African Americans who fought to free themselves and others, resisting the oppressive system of slavery in ways that culminated in the Emancipation Proclamation. This struggle was fought on American soil, by individuals and communities who identified as Americans.
That specificity is what some Black Texan voices and community historians have been most vocal about protecting. As one writer who grew up near Galveston put it: “Calling it ‘America’s Freedom Day’ and turning it into another opportunity for those to take a day off or host a cookout has cheapened its meaning. The Juneteenth I remember celebrating was about Black people remembering their ancestors, while focusing on what freedom truly meant for them then and us now.”
This is not a fringe position. It is the grounded, historically rooted argument that the holiday’s meaning depends on its specificity, and that expansions of that meaning, however well-intentioned, risk becoming a form of erasure.
The Case for Diaspora Connection
On the other side of the debate sits a different and equally grounded tradition: the long history of Black Americans understanding their freedom struggle as connected to and continuous with the freedom struggles of Black people across the African diaspora.
As part of the global African diaspora, people of African descent in the United States have long viewed their role in history as critical not just to their own development but to that of the world. Antebellum Black scholars started observing the milestones in the struggle of people of African descent to gain freedom and equality, commemorating the Haitian Revolution, the end of the slave trade, and the end of slavery in Jamaica, alongside American emancipation through Watch Night, Jubilee Day, and Juneteenth celebrations.
Emancipation Day is celebrated in Canada to honor the end of slavery in the British Empire, marked by parades, educational programs, and cultural performances. The connection between Caribbean people and Juneteenth is underscored by shared histories of slavery and colonialism, and Emancipation Day is observed in countries including the United States, the United Kingdom, and several African nations, with events that highlight the shared struggle for freedom and equality.
The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture has itself leaned into this framing, hosting Juneteenth programming that honors the enduring legacy of freedom through the vibrant traditions of the African diaspora in the United States and the Caribbean.
The diasporic argument is not, therefore, a corporate invention or a social media trend. It reflects a genuine and long-standing current within Black intellectual and cultural life, one that sees the specific Texas story not as the boundary of Juneteenth but as its anchor point, from which broader solidarity can radiate outward.
The Tension With Non-Black Participation
Then there is a third conversation, distinct from the diaspora debate and considerably more fraught: what role, if any, do non-Black Americans, particularly white Americans, play in Juneteenth?
Journalist Jelani Cobb pointed out as early as 2018 that “Juneteenth exists in this kind of cultural borderland, acknowledged by African Americans, scarcely noticed by most whites, because embracing the date requires a willingness to countenance slavery’s legacy in this country.” That observation, made before the holiday became federal, identified exactly the reason why mainstream white American participation in Juneteenth has been so awkward: not because the history is irrelevant to white Americans, but because genuinely engaging with it requires acknowledging things that a significant portion of white America would prefer not to sit with.
One of the most telling aspects of what observers have called the “Juneteenth conundrum” is who shows up and who does not. Those who do attend Juneteenth events appear to share some interesting commonalities: mixed-race couples, white grandparents with mixed-race or adopted Black children. The issues of race and slavery prevent the easy cross-cultural participation that we so frequently witness around white ethnic and patriotic celebrations. Because Juneteenth is so fraught with both the morality and memory of American slavery, it presents genuinely tricky terrain to navigate.
Some longtime Juneteenth organizers actively welcome non-Black participation. Others push back, not out of hostility, but out of concern that participation without historical engagement risks becoming performance rather than understanding.
The Social Media Distortion
One dimension of this debate that has accelerated recently is the role of social media in reshaping, and sometimes simply rewriting, the meaning of Juneteenth for audiences who encounter it primarily online.
Several TikTok videos have claimed that Juneteenth is not a Black American holiday but actually a Pan-African celebration for the entire African diaspora, a framing that writers rooted in Black Texas history have called not only false but deliberately misleading. The concern is that framing Juneteenth as a generalized Pan-African celebration erases the very specific injustice at its center: the deliberate withholding of freedom from Black Texans who were kept in slavery for two and a half years after it had been legally abolished.
There is also the uncomfortable observation that Black American cultural innovations are routinely absorbed, repackaged, and redistributed by other groups without credit or protection. The concern that Juneteenth is undergoing the same process is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition.
What the Debate Actually Reveals
The question of who Juneteenth belongs to is not, at its core, a question about exclusion. It is a question about meaning, and about what happens to meaning when a specific, rooted, community-owned tradition is scaled into a federal holiday that a diverse and deeply divided country is expected to observe together.
Juneteenth is a moment of liberation and jubilation, but it is also a moment where we lament. As we celebrate this federal holiday, we reflect on what independence means and recognize that the intolerance that sustained slavery resonates in our contemporary society. Yet, the resilience of the Black community abounds, continuing to make a way out of no way, overcoming trials and celebrating triumphs while honoring the place and price of freedom.
That framing, liberation and lament held simultaneously, is perhaps the most useful frame for navigating the ownership debate. Juneteenth is not a party to which everyone is simply invited as equal guests. It is a commemoration of a wound, and of the survival of those who bore it. Engaging with it honestly requires acknowledging that wound, not abstractly, but specifically and historically.
A diaspora connection that honors that specificity adds depth. An expansion that blurs it subtracts meaning. Non-Black participation that is rooted in genuine historical reckoning is something different from participation that treats Juneteenth as a summer cookout with a different name.
The debate about who Juneteenth belongs to will not be resolved in a think piece or a festival committee meeting. It is an ongoing negotiation, between Black Texan specificity and diaspora solidarity, between American history and global Black liberation, between a community’s right to own its own commemoration and a nation’s responsibility to honestly face what it is commemorating.
What is not negotiable is that the history at Juneteenth’s center must remain visible, must remain specific, and must not be softened, broadened, or commodified into something that allows people to celebrate freedom without confronting the full weight of what freedom was withheld from, and who did the withholding.
The holiday can hold many things. It cannot hold everything without losing the thing that makes it matter.
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References
Association for the Study of African American Life and History. (n.d.). Black history themes. ASALH. https://asalh.org/black-history-themes/
Brooks, A. E. (2025, June 18). Why don’t white people show up for Juneteenth the way they showed up for George Floyd? Religion Dispatches. https://religiondispatches.org/2025/06/18/why-dont-white-people-show-juneteenth-way-they-showed-george-floyd
Capital B News. (2025, June 17). Black Americans celebrate Juneteenth as sponsors disappear. https://capitalbnews.org/juneteenth-mainstream-black-communities/
Lineage First Magazine. (2023, November 9). Delineating Juneteenth from Pan-Africanism and Black Nationalism: Celebrating the self-emancipators. Medium. https://medium.com/lineagefirst-com/delineating-juneteenth-from-pan-africanism-and-black-nationalism-celebrating-the-self-emancipators-2953697a1bef
Littlejohn, J. R. (2022, June 26). How white people can celebrate Juneteenth. Medium/Momentum. https://momentum.medium.com/how-white-people-can-celebrate-juneteenth-f70e14fa037
National Museum of African American History and Culture. (2025). What is Juneteenth? Smithsonian Institution. https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/what-juneteenth
Smithsonian Institution. (2023). National Museum of African American History and Culture offers Juneteenth programming. https://www.si.edu/newsdesk/releases/national-museum-african-american-history-and-culture-offers-juneteenth-programming