Juneteenth: “What greater cause for jubilee could there be?”
By Daniel Wells
Bookseller, Birdie Books
June 16, 2026
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Juneteenth is a holiday of delayed gratification. It came as the culmination of centuries of strife and represents one of the greatest tenets of abolition: “Nobody's free until everybody's free” -Fannie Lou Hamer.
It is a celebration of a major milestone in the constant struggle that is the work of liberation. Arcs of that struggle are often punctuated by moments of joy where we gather with loved ones and enjoy the hard-earned freedoms others were not able to.
June 19, 1865.
About three weeks after the last major Confederate forces surrendered.
Two months after Robert E. Lee’s surrender.
Over two years after the Emancipation Proclamation.
That is when Major General Gordon Granger issued General Order Number Three, announcing the end of legal slavery in the United States, and the remainder of enslaved people were informed of their liberation. It is important to note that legal slavery was reinstated nationwide, as punishment for a crime, shortly after the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified in December 1865.
However, when we celebrate Juneteenth, that is the moment in time we are acknowledging that moment in Galveston, TX, when the last reach of the Confederacy relinquished its hold on the humans it had fought desperately to keep enslaved. That moment when the last enslaved individual, formerly considered three-fifths of a human, joined the ranks of those classified as free persons.
What greater cause for jubilee could there be?
Until fairly recently, Juneteenth was somewhat of a niche holiday, celebrated primarily in Texas by the Black descendants of American slaves. A time to deliberately enjoy the freedoms their ancestors could only hope for, to indulge in the joys of family and community, and to honor the resilience of those who worked for liberation and continue to do so.
As awareness of Juneteenth has grown, the essence of the holiday resonates with broader crowds. The hope for collective freedom still touches the hearts of modern celebrants and will do so for centuries to come. The work of abolitionists is never done. Not while America continues to obfuscate and export slavery through forced prison labor and predatory foreign policy. Systems that seem impossible to dismantle, but at some point, so did the Transatlantic Slave Trade.
Liberation is a daunting and far more personal task than most people realize. As one of my favorite abolitionists, Angela Davis, says in Freedom is a Constant Struggle, “Freedom can’t be contained within a paradigm that is individualistic. One cannot be free alone: freedom is collective.”
