President Donald Trump is now seeking to take credit for making Juneteenth "very famous" after he rescheduled his first rally since the start of the pandemic in order to avoid criticism. Juneteenth is a day commemorating the end of slavery in the United States.
Credit for Juneteenth
President Trump told The Wall Street Journal that before he brought it up, nobody had ever heard of it. He said that he did something good and made Juneteenth very famous.
President Trump said that Juneteenth is an important event and an important time, but nobody had ever heard of it. Trump was supposed to hold his rally on June 19 in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
But the date and place immediately earned him backlash from the public because June 19 is supposed to be a holiday to celebrate the end of slavery, and Tulsa, Oklahoma is where the massacre of hundreds of African Americans happened in 1921.
Due to the events, Trump has pushed back his rally to June 20, but it will still be in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Juneteenth is the oldest regular holiday in the United States that celebrates the end of slavery.
It also commemorates June 19, 1865, which was the day that Union Army Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger rode into Galveston, Texas, and told a group of saves that the Civil War has finally ended and that they had been freed.
The event took place two years after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Although the holiday has always been celebrated by the African American community, it has gotten more spotlight this year as the Black Lives Matter protest is still ongoing and growing.
The protest started after the death of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, at the hands of the Minneapolis Police force.
Also Read: Trump Lashes Out on Bolton Who Called Him a Liar, And a "Washed-up Guy"
The protest is calling for the end of systemic racism and police brutality in the country. Because of the ongoing movement, major companies have now made Juneteenth a paid holiday, and state and federal legislators have brought more attention to it too.
There are forty-seven states and the District of Columbia that marked June 19 as a state holiday or observance, but it still is not a federal holiday.
Acknowledging Juneteenth
President Trump is known to have very few African American advisers in the White House, and according to his Cabinet, the president asked the people around him if they have heard of Juneteenth. It turns out that none of them knows about the holiday.
However, the president also asked an aide during his interview if she had heard of the holiday, in which the aide replied that the White House had issued a statement last year regarding Juneteenth. Trump was surprised and did not know that the White House had commemorated the day last year.
President Donald Trump told The Wall Street Journal that it was a black Secret Service agent who told him about Juneteenth. Critics of the president saw his Juneteenth rally as a racist play but he claimed that he did not schedule the rally on the holiday on purpose and that it was all coincidence.
Related Article: Supreme Court Blocks Trump from Ending 'Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals'
