COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) – Congress and President Joe Biden acted with unusual swiftness this week in approving Juneteenth as a national holiday, a move that sent many states scrambling to clarify their policies on the observance with less than a business day’s notice.
Nearly all states recognize Juneteenth in some fashion, at least on paper. But most have been slow to move beyond proclamations issued by governors or resolutions passed by lawmakers. At least seven states have designated it in law as an official paid state holiday – Illinois, Louisiana, New Jersey, New York, Texas, Virginia and Washington.
This year alone, legislation to formally recognize Juneteenth died in Florida and South Dakota and is stalled in Ohio, all states controlled by Republicans. But even in Maryland, where Democrats control the Legislature, a Juneteenth bill passed one chamber only to die in the other.
The effort recalls the drawn-out battles over recognizing Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the last time the federal government designated a new holiday. That legislation, finally passed in 1983, scheduled the holiday to begin three years later. It set off bitter debates in the states over whether to enact their own holidays.
Only a handful of states headed into Thursday’s signing of the federal Juneteenth law with the paid holiday on the books to be celebrated in 2021. The governors of Washington, Illinois and Louisiana, by contrast, all signed more recent laws that were set to kick in for 2022, adding to the muddled rollout.