Donald Trump Says He Should Get Credit For Making Juneteenth “Very Famous”

Donald Trump says he should get credit for making #Juneteenth “very famous.”

Juneteenth, also known as Freedom Day, Jubilee Day, Cel-Liberation Day and the Black Fourth of July, is a day that Americans, specifically Black Americans, celebrate the  Union army general Gordon Granger’s reading of federal orders in the city of Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865, proclaiming that all enslaved Blacks in Texas were now free. However, Black people were declared free via the Emancipation Proclamation almost two and half years earlier, but slave owners lied to and misled Black Americans into believing they were still enslaved.

This is a day that all Black Americans know or should know, and Trump claims that he made it popular. The celebrity-in-chief says that by him rescheduling his rally, which was originally supposed to take place in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on June 19, but was changed after he received a backlash, he believes he brought attention to the holiday. The Black community and its allies called out Trump for blatantly disrespecting the Black community by trying to hold a rally in Tulsa, a city that used to be the home to the original Black Wall Street, which was destroyed by white supremacists and the U.S. government on May 31 through June 1. The Black Wall Street was in Greenwood, Tulsa, Oklahoma, and was a neighborhood that consisted of Black-owned businesses and operations, including grocery stores, banks, theaters, hotels, and more.

“I did something good: I made Juneteenth very famous,” he said, referring to his initial rally date during an interview. “It’s actually an important event, an important time. But nobody had ever heard of it.”

As Juneteenth approaches and Black America continues to grieve the loss of George Floyd, many companies and organizations have been changing Juneteenth into a paid holiday. State and federal lawmakers have also now been pushing to make Jubilee a federal holiday.