Juneteenth
Today is Juneteenth, which became a federal holiday on 17 June 2021 when President Joe Biden signed Juneteenth National Independence Day into law, making it the 12th federal holiday. Juneteenth commemorates 19 June 1865, the date Major General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, and delivered General Order No. 3 announcing the end of legalized slavery in Texas.

Although the war was over with General Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House two months earlier, Lee’s surrender was ignored in Texas, where many plantation owners refused to acknowledge it and vowed never to “release” their enslaved workers from bondage.
A week before Granger’s arrival, a brigade of the 25th Army Corps, comprised of more than 1,000 African-descendant soldiers, arrived in Galveston and captured the city. They chased the rebel government and the remaining Confederate soldiers into Mexico. The Black soldiers of the 25th Army Corps also spread the word about freedom to the enslaved Texas population.
When General Granger arrived with General Order No. 3, he forced plantation owners to read it to their enslaved men, women, and children. Thus was born Juneteenth, which was first celebrated exactly one year after the final freeing of the last enslaved people in America. Fittingly, in 1980, Texas became the first state to promulgate Juneteenth as a state holiday. Eventually, another forty-six followed, ultimately leading to Biden’s 2021 federal holiday promulgation.
I was reminded of this history this morning when I remembered that Donald Trump had, in an instance of impeccable timing, scheduled one of his wild and crazy rallies back in 2020 on Juneteenth. According to the Associated Press, Trump was unaware of Juneteenth, let alone the significance of it to the Black community, when he announced the date of his rally. Consequently, he did not anticipate the blowback he would get. But get it he did. Even from his own supporters. In a rare instance of backing down, he moved the rally to the next day, the 20th, at the BOK Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Having insulted the Black community with the date, Trump added further insult with the place — Tulsa.
The Tulsa Race Massacre
In African American history, Tulsa has revered significance. For it was on another day in June, the 1st June day of 1921, that Tulsa was the site of the worst race massacre in American history. And, unless you were a college U.S. history major, it is likely no one taught you a thing about it as you went through school.
The day before, police had arrested a young black man by the name of Dick Rowland for allegedly attacking a white woman in a Tulsa elevator (Weeks later, she said it never happened). Soon after Rowland’s arrest, rumors began to spread about a group of whites planning a lynching party. To protect Rowland, African American World War 1 veterans surrounded the jail holding him. There was a standoff with a mob of whites. Somebody fired a shot, no one knows who, and a firefight ensued. The much larger white mob pushed the black vets all the way to Greenwood, Tulsa’s Black section.
Greenwood was the wealthiest Black community in the country. Known as the Black Wall Street, Oil had made it rich. Racism was about to destroy it. Over the course of the day, white Tulsans turned 6,000 homes and businesses and 36 square city blocks to ash. Pilots of two airplanes dropped turpentine bombs on buildings, instantly igniting them. They slaughtered three hundred African Americans and threw most into mass graves. Authorities never prosecuted anyone for anything. The federal government ignored it. Tulsa, population 100,000, swept it all under the rug. Two generations later, nobody knew a thing about it. It was never taught in schools, no books were written, no oral history passed down. It was as if it never happened.

Tulsa’s mayor from 2016 through 2024, G. T. Bynum, decided to pull the rug up to see what was hiding under it. He was committed to investigating what happened and determining accountability. He found a couple of the mass graves and began having them excavated. The goal was to at least identify as many victims as possible through DNA analysis.
Bynum formed the City of Tulsa 1921 Graves Investigation Office, convened experts to help locate, identify, and connect people today with those lost more than 100 years ago, and established the 1921 Graves Press Room to report on the effort.
Bynum’s successor, Monroe Nichols IV, the first Black to be elected Mayor of Tulsa, vowed to continue the effort, and has.
In 2021, on the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre, President Biden, in an emotional speech in that city, said he had “come to fill the silence” about one of the nation’s darkest — and long-suppressed — moments of racial violence.
“Some injustices are so heinous, so horrific, so grievous, they cannot be buried, no matter how hard people try,” Biden said. “Only with truth can come healing.”
As far as I have been able to document, Donald Trump has yet to say one word in public about the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921.
And what has he said about Juneteenth? Four years ago, he denigrated it, saying, ‘nobody had ever heard of it’ before he brought it up, and that he “had made it famous,” despite African Americans celebrating it for 158 years. He told the Wall Street Journal he “polled many people around him, none of whom had heard of Juneteenth.” I have no trouble believing that. Might be the only time he’s told the truth since the day he rode down the gold-plated escalator ten years ago this week.
Although throughout the recent campaign for his second term, Trump said nothing about either Juneteenth or the Tulsa Race Massacre, Janiyah Thomas, the campaign’s director of Black media, did issue a statement commemorating Juneteenth, saying, “Today, we reflect on how far we [have] come as a nation and remember that light will always triumph over darkness. With President Trump’s leadership, our party will continue to advance the American dream for all people.”
If you believe that, I have some prime, Grade A land in Florida I would like to sell you — just as soon as the tide goes out.
First DOJ investigation
Since 1921, the federal government never investigated the massacre. Neither had the state of Oklahoma. But in September 2024, the Department of Justice opened a cold case investigation into the massacre under the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act; the department closed the investigation in January, barely three months after starting, and shortly before it would have had to hand it off to the new Trump administration. The investigation’s report said:
“The Government has reviewed the events of May 31 and June 1, 1921, and issues this Report to officially acknowledge, illuminate, and preserve for history the horrible ordeals of the massacre’s victims. This Report is the first full accounting of the massacre undertaken by the Department of Justice.”
The report’s Executive Summary concludes:
“On the night of May 31, 1921, a violent attack by as many as 10,000 white Tulsans
destroyed the thriving Black community of Greenwood, Oklahoma—a prosperous area often referred to as “Black Wall Street.” The attack, which lasted into the afternoon of June 1, was so systematic and coordinated that it transcended mere mob violence. White men murdered hundreds of Black residents, burned businesses and homes to the ground, and left survivors without resources or recourse. In the aftermath, authorities failed to offer meaningful help, and efforts to seek justice through the courts foundered.”
Although the Biden Department of Justice did not say so, most observers thought it closed the investigation and published its report ten days before Trump’s second term because Justice officials believed if left open, Trump’s DOJ would put it where it would never see the light of day.
As Tulsa Mayor Monroe Nichols continues the investigation into the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. He has reaffirmed the city’s commitment to the 1921 Graves Investigation and the Community Engagement Genealogy Project, according to the City of Tulsa. This ongoing work aims to bring closure to families of victims and to identify more victims.
Now, educators must teach this stain on our history in all our nation’s schools.
Fat chance.