COMMEMORATING JUNETEENTH

On 2026-06-08, Representative Glenn Ivey (D-MD-4) delivered a floor speech titled "COMMEMORATING JUNETEENTH" in the House.

COMMEMORATING JUNETEENTH

Congressional Record, Volume 172 Issue 96 (Monday, June 8, 2026) [Congressional Record Volume 172, Number 96 (Monday, June 8, 2026)] [House] [Pages H3982-H3988] From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [ www.gpo.gov ] COMMEMORATING JUNETEENTH (Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 3, 2025, Ms. McClellan of Virginia was recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.) General Leave Ms. McCLELLAN. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material on the subject of this Special Order. The SPEAKER pro tempore. Is there objection to the request of the gentlewoman from Virginia? There was no objection. Ms. McCLELLAN. Mr. Speaker, it is with great honor that I rise today to anchor this Congressional Black Caucus Special Order hour commemorating Juneteenth. Next week, the Nation will pause to celebrate Juneteenth. Juneteenth commemorates June 19, 1865, when Union Major General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, and issued General Order No. 3, which finally freed more than 250,000 enslaved people in that State. For while the Emancipation Proclamation officially went into effect on July 1, 1863, emancipating those enslaved in the rebelling States of the Confederacy, it took over 2\1/2\ years for the news to reach the western-most Confederate State of Texas. Broadly, Juneteenth marks Freedom Day, Jubilee Day, or Black Independence Day. Juneteenth is considered the [[Page H3983]] longest-running African-American holiday. While communities have celebrated the date since 1866, it was not officially signed into United States law as a Federal holiday until June of 2021. Juneteenth symbolizes that, unlike what we were taught in our schoolbooks, emancipation was not a moment. It was a movement. It was a movement that included acts of resistance, rebellion, and self- liberation since Africans first arrived on American soil in bondage. As the first Black woman serving in this body from the Commonwealth of Virginia, I am all too familiar with this story, for the Commonwealth is both the birthplace of American democracy and the birthplace of the American slave trail. In July of 1619, the House of Burgesses met at Jamestown, bringing the concept of a representative democracy modeled after the English Parliament that evolved into the modern-day bicameral legislature. The House of Burgesses continues to operate today as the Virginia House of Delegates. A month later, in August of 1619, a Dutch privateer arrived at Point Comfort, Virginia, containing, ``20 and odd'' Africans that John Rolfe recorded were traded for provisions. They were originally captured by Portuguese slavers in West Central Africa, known today as Angola. While slavery was not officially acknowledged in the laws of Virginia until 1661, there is no doubt that the first Africans aboard the White Lion were treated as slaves, assigned heavy labor, and treated as property by the colonial elite. {time} 2010 I am quite cognizant that 250 years ago when Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence and said that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, he did not include the nearly half a million enslaved men, women, and children or, indeed, any women at all in the Thirteen Colonies. He did not include those enslaved at his beloved Monticello, including his own children. I am quite clear that when James Madison wrote the Virginia Plan that formed the foundation for a government by, of, and for we the people in order to form a more perfect Union, he did not include the over 300 enslaved people who lived and labored at his Montpelier estate under three generations of his family. The U.S. Constitution, adopted in 1789, considered enslaved individuals only three-fifths of a person for the purpose of how many people would serve in this body and for taxation. The States that came together to create that more perfect Union treated those people as property. Since 1789, the story of America has been one of each generation trying to reconcile the ideals upon which we were founded with the reality and making the ideals true for us all. Despite what some would have you believe, slavery literally tore this country apart, for as then Abraham Lincoln predicted in 1858, a house divided against itself cannot stand. He said this government could not endure permanently, half slave and half free. While he did not expect the Union to be dissolved, and he did not expect the house to fall, he expected it would cease to be divided. It took a war to do that. Once Abraham Lincoln was elected President, and South Carolina became the first State to secede from the Union, its 1860 Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina explicitly and repeatedly states that the preservation and expansion of slavery was the primary reason for leaving the Union. Mississippi, Georgia, and Texas likewise formally published Declarations of Causes that explicitly cited the preservation and expansion of slavery as their primary reason for seceding. States like Alabama and Virginia passed shorter ordinances of secession directly citing the hostile attitudes of the Federal Government toward their ``domestic institutions'' and the election of a sectional party based on antislavery platforms. It was clear they were seceding because of slavery, so that they could keep it. After the war, Reconstruction sought to bind the country's wounds and expand the promise of its founding to the formerly enslaved, and Congress expanded suffrage to Black citizens, used Federal troops to vigorously defend it in response to a violent backlash across the South. Congress passed three Reconstruction amendments designed to guarantee equal, civil, and legal rights to formerly enslaved Americans. All three granted Congress the power to enforce their provisions through legislation: the 13th Amendment finally abolishing slavery in the United States; the 14th Amendment guaranteeing citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the United States and prohibited any State from abridging the privileges or immunities of citizenship, applied due process of laws to the States, and provided equal protection under the law. It also provided for the reduction of representation in the House of Representatives of any State that disenfranchised any male citizens--and they meant male--over 21 years of age in Federal elections, except for participation in a rebellion or other crime; and the 15th Amendment prohibited the denial or abridgement of the right to vote on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. Yet, even with these amendments, Southern States resisted, resorting to paramilitary organizations like the Ku Klux Klan to terrorize Black citizens for daring to seek to vote, run for office, serve on juries, own property, open businesses, live in the wrong neighborhood, go to the wrong school, eventually drink from the wrong water fountain. In 1870 and 1871, Congress passed the Enforcement Acts to allow the Federal Government to intervene when States or individuals infringed upon the rights provided in the 14th and 15th Amendments, and as a result Black men gained political power across the South. In 1870, Senator Hiram Rhodes Revels of Mississippi and Representative Joseph H. Rainey of South Carolina became the first Black Members of Congress. A total of 22 Black men served in Congress between 1870 and 1901, including my predecessor, John Mercer Langston of Virginia's Fourth District, in 1890. The political, social, and economic power gained by Blacks across the South during Reconstruction then faced a violent backlash, as the KKK and other groups began a reign of terror that relied extensively on lynchings. To resolve the deadlocked Presidential election of 1876, the Compromise of 1877 brought Reconstruction to an end, the Federal Government removed its troops from the South, and widespread violence, propaganda, and voter suppression began. In the final year of Reconstruction, the unraveling of Federal protection and voting rights began when the Supreme Court issued two opinions that gutted the Enforcement Act--United States v. Cruikshank and the United States v. Reese. Once Democrats regained control and Reconstruction ended in the South, Congress lost interest in Federal intervention and State disenfranchisement efforts. Then the long arc toward moral justice began again. When President Harry Truman integrated the Army and when the civil rights movement began to gain ground, those Southern Democrats fled the Democratic Party and became Republicans. Today, we see a very similar backlash to the backlash to progress that came after Reconstruction. With the first Court case gutting the Voting Rights Act, the Shelby decision, and now the Callais decision, we see a rollback of the Federal Government protecting voting rights. We see a weaponization of the very tools used to ensure that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness was open to all roll back the progress made in civil rights and equal protection under the law. We see an administration that wants to tell one side of the story that I just told that doesn't want anything uncomfortable to be taught in our schools, that doesn't want anything about slavery mentioned in our public spaces, in our museums, or in our curriculum, that doesn't want that backlash taught. Juneteenth gives us two opportunities: One, to celebrate the extraordinary resilience of Black Americans [[Page H3984]] who came here through the Middle Passage and bondage, and today are at historic high numbers in political leadership and representation. However, it also gives us an opportunity to acknowledge how we got here--the good, the bad, and the ugly; to recognize the pattern, to recognize the backlash to