Juneteenth and the Meaning of the American Experiment

That Juneteenth should be a national holiday is beyond debate. The end of the Civil War, the defeat of the Confederacy, and the emancipation of the last enslaved people in the South obviously deserves recognition and national celebration. Juneteenth is, in fact, the quintessential American holiday, the purest celebration of what the American experiment means.

But we should do more than name a day, which now seems trivial, cheapened by how many commemorative days and months we have. In addition to making Juneteenth a federal holiday, we should mobilize a national effort to remove the last of the Confederacy’s monuments and memorials from our public landscape.