Starting this year, Juneteenth is an official holy day of remembrance for Presbyterian Foundation employees.

The offices of the Foundation will be closed, and the staff will be off of work to observe the day.

Juneteenth is the commemoration of the ending of slavery in the United States. It is so named because on June 19, 1865, Union soldiers landed at Galveston, Texas, to share the news that the Civil War had ended and that enslaved people had been freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. This was 2 ½ years after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation became law on January 1, 1863.

This year, June 19 is on a Saturday; Juneteenth will be observed by the Foundation on June 18, 2021. The Foundation Board of Trustees meeting, which would normally be scheduled for June 18, was moved to June 17 in recognition of the importance of this day and to allow both employees and members of the Board of Trustees time and opportunity to observe the day.

The Board of Trustees voted to make Juneteenth an official holy day of remembrance during its November 2020 meeting. Other Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) agencies and ministries have also designated Juneteenth as a day of remembrance, including the Administrative Services Group, Office of the General Assembly, Presbyterian Mission Agency, Presbyterian Publishing Corporation, Investment and Loan Program, Board of Pensions, and Presbyterian Women.

“The Presbyterian Foundation is giving sustained, intentional focus on our strategic priority of diversity, equity, and inclusion in who we are as a Board and as a staff, cultivating a culture of education of, conscientization in, and proficiency in dynamics of historical, institutional, and systemic racism,” says Rev. Dr. Neal Presa, Chair of the Presbyterian Foundation Board of Trustees. “Juneteenth is a sacred day of reckoning for the Church, and we dare say, for our nation, as it brings to attention the delay of more than two and a half years for official word to reach enslaved Blacks in Texas that the Emancipation Proclamation had been issued years prior. The tragedy of that gap in time — of justice delayed was justice denied — calls forth our collective wills that we as Christians and as a people can never rest until the fulness of racial equality and racial equity is realized.”

Related resources

• For those who wish to study Juneteenth further, you can find resources about Juneteenth from the Presbyterian Historical Society here.
• Additionally, the PC(USA) Store is offering a new Lenten devotional focused on slavery. Lent of Liberation: Confronting the Legacy of American Slavery by Cheri L. Mills was published in January 2021. You can find it here.
• Resources on Racial Justice from the Presbyterian Mission Agency can be found here.