Juneteenth is now an official New York state holiday
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Assemblymember Alicia Hyndman sponsored legislation to make Juneteenth a New York state holiday. Photo via Hyndman’s office
By David Brand
Juneteenth is now an official New York state holiday, after Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Wednesday signed a bill to commemorate the end of slavery in the United States.
The legislation was sponsored by Queens Assemblymember Alicia Hyndman and became law four months after Cuomo signed an executive order to officially observe Juneteenth on this past June 19.
“Juneteenth serves as a piece of history towards Black liberation in this country,” Hyndman said Wednesday.
The 2021 holiday calendar for state employees published on the state website by the Department of Civil Service has been updated to include Juneteenth. June 19, 2021 is a Saturday. The governor’s office did not provide a response to a question about whether state buildings will close on the preceding Friday.
The Eagle first reported last month on the exclusion of Juneteenth from the public holiday calendar, despite Cuomo’s pledge to sign the legislation into law.
Juneteenth marks the anniversary of June 19, 1865, the date Union soldiers arrived at Galveston, Texas to announce that the Civil War had ended and that all enslaved Black and African Americans were free. The end of the war came two years after Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation freeing slaves in the Confederate states.
Cuomo issued an executive order recognizing June 19, 2020 as a state holiday in June amid weeks of demonstrations against racist police violence and institutional racism following the police killings of George Floyd in Minnesota and Breonna Taylor in Kentucky.
Hyndman said that observing Juneteeth will go along way to help New Yorkers understand the impact of slavery and racism.
“When it comes to systemic racism in classes across the country, we do not acknowledge slavery and the lasting effects,” she said at the time. “This is American history and we have to acknowledge it.”
