Friday is Juneteenth, a day that marks the end of slavery in Texas 155 years ago. For decades, African Americans have celebrated June 19 to honor the closing of a horrific chapter in American history, to celebrate Black achievements, and to reflect on what still needs to be done to realize true racial equality.

But this year, inspired by global protests over last month’s killing of George Floyd while in police custody, and the devastating effects of COVID-19 on communities of color, Juneteenth’s significance is being amplified with unprecedented actions by corporate and government leaders.

This week, the governors of New York and Virginia declared Juneteenth a paid holiday for state employees, with New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo saying on his official website that he will introduce legislation next year “to make it an official state holiday so New Yorkers can use this day to reflect on all the changes we still need to make to create a more fair, just and equal society."

Corporations are also stepping up. On Juneteenth this year, the retail chains Best Buy and Target are giving their employees paid time off. Banks from Capital One to J.P. Morgan Chase to U.S. Bank are closing early. 

Following Twitter Chief Executive Jack Dorsey’s tweet last week that Juneteenth would be “a company holiday in the U.S., forevermore,” tech firms from Amazon to Facebook to Google are encouraging their employees to forgo meetings and instead take advantage of learning opportunities “to reflect... and support each other,” Amazon Chief Executive Jeff Bezos said in a memo to employees Tuesday. 

On Wednesday, Uber Chief Executive Dara Khosrowshahi announced that Juneteenth would be a paid day off for its workers. ”We encourage employees to spend it in a way that allows them to stand up against racism,” he tweeted, “whether that’s by learning, participating in a community action, or reflecting on how to make change.”

Even the National Football League, which famously denied Colin Kaepernick a spot on a team since 2016, when he began kneeling during the national anthem to protest police brutality toward African-Americans, has “established June 19 as a permanent company holiday moving forward,” according to NFL.com. Teams including the Denver Broncos, Detroit Lions, Arizona Cardinals, Green Bay Packers and Baltimore Ravens all announced this week that they will permanently recognize Juneteenth. 

Teams with the National Basketball Assn. are also honoring the date. The Cleveland Cavaliers tweeted last week that Juneteenth will be "observed as an annual paid holiday for our entire organization." The Atlanta Hawks and Sacramento Kings are also observing the day as a company-wide holiday. 

“We’re in the middle of a huge social movement about racial justice, and we haven’t had anything like this since the middle 1960s,” said Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project at the University of California-Los Angeles. “There has been a rapid and strong shift of public opinion in the country about the need to do something.”

With protests continuing day after day for weeks and many of the larger metropolitan events having a white majority, Orfield said, “Corporate leaders are noticing. We have these really large national movements very rarely in United States history, and this is a serious one. They need to have some kind of role, and a lot of them haven’t truthfully done very much up until now.”

In addition to allowing their employees paid time off to reflect on the significance of Juneteenth, Orfield said larger, systemic changes are needed. “People on the civil rights side would really like to see this go inside, in terms of who corporations hire, who they promote, what kind of content they put out to the country,” he said.

According to the Center for American Progress, African American workers face systematically higher unemployment rates, fewer job opportunities, lower pay, poorer benefits and greater job instability, due in large part to outright discrimination and occupational segregation. 

While the unemployment rate for white workers in May 2020 was 12.4 percent, according to the U.S. Bureau for Labor Statistics, for African Americans, it was 35 percent higher; 16.8 percent of Blacks were unemployed.

Blacks are also disproportionately affected by COVID-19, with African Americans dying at three times the rate of white people, according to APM Research Lab, as well as the criminal justice system. African Americans are incarcerated at more than five times the rate of whites, according to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

As much as Juneteenth is a day to reflect on what has been accomplished, it’s increasingly a meditation about what still needs to be done. Juneteenth is named for June 19, 1865. That’s when U.S. Major General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, with federal troops to announce the end of the Civil War and that all slaves were free –more than two years after President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation had taken effect. 

“Juneteenth was really the moment when we all thought that we would have and enjoy the kind of citizenship and freedom enjoyed in the U.S. and that it would spread throughout the world. That turned out not to be the case,” said Cecil Foster, a professor at the University of Buffalo and author of the book, They Call Me George, about North American blacks’ only form of employment for many years following slavery – as porters in trains’ sleeping cars.

The reconstruction era that came out of the Civil War, the Jim Crow laws that mandated racial segregation in former Confederate states, and the current militarization of the police and prison systems, Foster said, “have deprived certain people of the freedom Juneteenth promised." 

Being a professor within the State University of New York system, Foster is getting a paid day off to celebrate Juneteenth following Governor Cuomo’s executive order declaring it a holiday for state employees. He said he would spend the day reflecting on the black experience. 

Foster is part of a growing chorus of academics and activists advocating to make Juneteenth a national holiday. 

“I think that’s appropriate because it allows us to reflect on what has happened in the past and to reach back to that moment when everything seemed to be good and to look at how we lost it and how we can regain it,” Foster said.

The way forward, he said, is to recognize that not everyone in the United States enjoys social justice equally, to apologize for the wrongs of the past, and to reject those wrongs moving into the future.

“That’s where healing can begin,” he said. “What’s implied in the notion of social justice is the notion that we can develop a more perfect union and have citizens who become more perfect, which is the suggestion that tomorrow, we can improve upon today.”