NEW YORK -- Question for America: Why should Black people make a big fuss about the nation’s 250th anniversary when places like Nassau County, New York, won’t even recognize our history?

In 2020, Juneteenth became a state holiday and a year later, it became a federal one.

Yet in Nassau County, June 19 has not been officially recognized, meaning it’s not a paid holiday that county employees can use to celebrate a day of deep historical significance for Black people across the country.

“We worked for it, our ancestors worked for it, and this is 2026,” said Tina Hodge-Bowles, of the NAACP’s Hempstead branch. “It shouldn’t be a question.”

Hodge-Bowles was one of hundreds of union members, community leaders and advocates who packed the plaza outside Nassau County’s Executive and Legislative Building in Mineola earlier this month to push county lawmakers to make Juneteenth a paid holiday for county workers.

Organizers argued that Nassau, one of the few New York counties that does not recognize the holiday, is out of step with neighboring districts.

But it is more than that. It is an insult and an outrage.

“For Nassau County to stand alone in refusing to recognize Juneteenth as an official public holiday is a slap in the face to the descendants of the enslaved, to the workers who keep that county running and to every American who believes the truth of our history deserves our reverence and respect,” the Rev. Al Sharpton, president of the National Action Network, said in a statement.

“When June 19 became a New York State holiday in 2020 and a federal holiday in 2021, this nation was finally admitting that freedom did not arrive for everyone on the same day. You cannot celebrate liberty on the Fourth of July and then tell Black workers that Juneteenth is just another workday.”

Juneteenth marks the day, June 19, 1865, when federal troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, to take control of the state and ensure that all enslaved people were freed.

An official handwritten record of the handwritten original Juneteenth emancipation announcement is preserved at the National Archives Building in Washington, D.C.

“The people of the state of Texas are informed that in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, ‘all slaves are free,’” says the notice signed by Maj. F.W. Emery on behalf of Union Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger on June 19, 1865 — two months after President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated.

That makes Juneteenth, in the hearts and minds of many African Americans, the true Independence Day, not the Fourth of July farce that Black people have been sold about a nation built on the backs of slaves, born when men, women and children had already been in bondage — families torn apart, punished for reading or writing — for 157 years.

“What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?” abolitionist Frederick Douglass, himself an escaped slave, asked a New York crowd in 1852. “I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.”

Given that history, and given Douglass’ sobering perspective, how dare anyone, including Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, try to deny county workers, especially Black county workers, a state- and federally-recognized Independence Day.

Blakeman, a Republican who is running for governor, said New York can’t afford another holiday, and suggested union leaders who want Juneteenth ought to trade in one of the other holidays already on the books.

In other words, you can celebrate your legacy if you’re willing to give up Christmas or New Year’s Day.

If you’re really forced to trade a day, give them back the Fourth of July.

Even this year, it’s not really all it’s cracked up to be.

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