Actress Taraji P. Henson warned “there is an agenda” to remove Juneteenth as a federal holiday, and that people need to “show up and fight for it.”
The holiday, recognized annually on June 19, was signed into law by President Joe Biden in 2021. Henson, known for her roles in films such as The Color Purple and Hidden Figures, as well as the television series Empire, stressed the need for people to celebrate the established holiday to ensure “we can keep it.”
“I’m going to say this, and I’m going to say it once,” Henson said on ABC’s The View. “We better start celebrating it, because there is an agenda that’s trying to take it. So it means more now than it’s ever meant before because we’ve got to show up and fight for it so we can keep it. It’s very serious what we’re up against, it keeps me up at night. I’m counting on humanity, though.”
Henson, who warned last year that she could quit acting due to low pay, added that part of the need to fight for Juneteenth is because “a lot of people” are not able to move outside the country, prompting The View co-host Whoopi Goldberg to object and say that leaving the country is “giving it over to somebody.” Goldberg previously suggested in 2016 that she might move out of the United States if then-presidential candidate Donald Trump became president.
Former 2024 presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy said last year that he believed Juneteenth was made into a holiday “under political duress” in the wake of George Floyd’s death in 2020. He was also seen talking to an audience in Iowa when he suggested canceling Juneteenth “or one of the other useless ones [holidays] we made up” in exchange for making Election Day a federal holiday.
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Trump, who was president from 2017 through the start of 2021, vowed in September 2020 to make Juneteenth a federal holiday. He also promised to designate the Ku Klux Klan as a terrorist organization.
This year, 41% of private employers are viewing Juneteenth as a paid holiday, up slightly from the 39% that observed it last year. Upon being designated as a holiday in 2021, just 9% of private employers viewed Juneteenth as such.