How does United States mark Emancipation Days?
Birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr.
- Local date
- January 18, 2027
- When is it?
- The third Monday in January, as written into the list in 5 U.S.C. §6103(a) — a floating date, unlike Juneteenth's fixed 19 June.
The Birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. falls on the third Monday in January and comes from Public Law 98-144, signed 2 November 1983 (97 Stat. 917) — again a single line added to the list in 5 U.S.C. §6103(a). Reading the two dates together is what shows the pace: of the eleven federal holidays currently in §6103(a), exactly two deal with slavery and what followed it, and thirty-eight years separate them. After King's birthday was added in 1983, no holiday was added to the federal list at all until Juneteenth in 2021 — one addition in thirty-eight years, and this was it.
Juneteenth National Independence Day
- Local date
- June 19, 2027
19 June marks the day in 1865 when Major General Gordon Granger read General Order No. 3 at Galveston, informing the people of Texas that all enslaved people were free — two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation. Becoming a federal holiday took another 156 years, and Texas got there first: House Bill 1016 of the 66th Legislature made 19 June "Emancipation Day in Texas," a legal state holiday effective from 1980. The federal statute came on 17 June 2021, when Public Law 117-17 inserted the single line "Juneteenth National Independence Day, June 19." into 5 U.S.C. §6103(a), immediately after the item for Memorial Day. The Senate passed it on 15 June, the House on 16 June, and it was signed on 17 June — three days end to end. Subsection (b) of the same section matters in practice: when a holiday falls on a Saturday, the Friday before is the legal public holiday for employees on a Monday-to-Friday week, so 19 June 2027 falls on a Saturday and the day actually taken is Friday 18 June. A federal holiday binds federal agencies and the District of Columbia; each state decides for itself whether to follow.
What is this topic?
The two largest slaveholding societies in the Americas both waited until the 2020s to put abolition on the national holiday calendar — the United States in 2021, Brazil in 2023 — more than a century and a half after slavery ended in law. Both arrived the same way, from below: Texas made 19 June a state holiday in 1980, and Brazil's 20 November passed through the school calendar and then a commemorative-date statute before it became a holiday. India has no abolition holiday; the closest date, Ambedkar Jayanti on 14 April, is not even on the central government's annual holiday list and is granted each year by a separate order. Taiwan names 21 March in statute and expressly gives no day off, Japan has the law but no date, and neither Indonesia's nor China's national holiday list contains anything of the kind.
Sources and dates
Dates follow local time zones, calendars, and official notices. Check the source when a date is estimated or locally variable.