Juneteenth is now a federal holiday. What about Kansas and Missouri?

Federal and Missouri state workers enjoyed a paid day off Friday after Congress this week passed a bill to declare Juneteenth — a day celebrating the abolition of slavery — a federal holiday. But in Kansas, state workers won’t have the same opportunity until at least next year.

The holiday originates in Galveston, Texas, where Union Major General Gordon Granger arrived on June 19, 1865 to announce the end of the Civil War and to enforce the end of slavery in Texas.

President Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation declared slaves in Texas and other Confederate states legally free. But the enslaved weren’t physically liberated until the Union’s victory.

Slaves in border states which did not secede weren’t freed under federal law until December of 1865 with the ratification of the 13th Amendment. Missouri, a border state, abolished slavery months earlier at a state constitutional convention in January of 1865.

While dates of liberation varied between states, June 19 has long held special cultural importance. Celebrations took place on the first anniversary of Granger’s announcement in 1866, starting a tradition that led to the date’s formal recognition as a Texas state holiday in 1980. Other states adopted the date as well.

“Growing up in segregated Texas, Juneteenth was always a special occasion in my community — where Black schools had the day off and neighbors celebrated the official end of our ancestors’ forced servitude and the evil that is slavery,” said U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a Missouri Democrat.

Long-running efforts to make Juneteenth a national holiday suddenly gained traction this week after Sen .Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican, dropped his objection and the Senate passed the bill Tuesday by unanimous consent.

The House passed it the next day by a lopsided 415 to 14, with only a handful of Republicans opposing it.

In Missouri, Gov. Mike Parson’s administration announced Thursday afternoon state offices would be closed Friday to commemorate the holiday.

Missouri state workers have twelve other paid holidays a year. Juneteenth is not designated a paid state holiday in law, but Missouri allows state workers a paid holiday for days designated by the governor or the president.

Kansas holidays are established by legislative resolution. State Sen. David Haley, a Kansas City, Kansas, Democrat, said he has been pushing for such a resolution for years and will try again when the Legislature returns to Topeka in January.

“Frankly, I think it will have cooled by then, knowing the general mentality,” he said. “The time to do it would be now in June 2021 while there’s great attention to it but the attention span of this issue may cool over the next half of a year.”

Kansas has long been proud of its history as a free state. Prior to the Civil War, it earned the nickname “Bleeding Kansas” for violent skirmishes with pro-slavery Missourians to the east.

Although Kansas never held slaves, Haley said it remained important for the state to honor abolition.

“We need to look at what freedom really means, go beyond that,” Haley said. “Juneteenth and liberation by race could certainly extend to inequities that could be traced to race.”

U.S. Sen. Roger Marshall, a Kansas Republican who supported creation of the federal holiday, acknowledged he knew little about the its history until recently.

“You know to be honest, it’s something that we didn’t study in history class that I can recall anyway, so I think it’s a great way to bring recognition to a very important moment in American history,” Marshall said.

Juneteenth’s designation as a federal holiday comes against the backdrop of Republican efforts to restrict schools from teaching critical race theory, an academic field focused on analyzing systemic racism in American institutions.

MSNBC host Joy Ann Reid accused GOP lawmakers of hypocrisy.

“These Republicans want credit for supporting making Juneteenth a holiday while simultaneously pushing to ban school children from learning why Juneteenth is a holiday. It’s almost art,” she said on Twitter Wednesday.

Marshall drew a distinction between teaching students about Juneteenth and about critical race theory.

“In my eyes, there’s a distinction between the two. I think Juneteenth is a historical date with very clearly defined happenings and it’s well-documented. I think if you got a group of historians together I bet the supermajority would agree on the happenings of Juneteenth from what I’ve seen. Critical race theory seems to be very controversial — what’s true and what isn’t true,” Marshall said.

However, many Black members of Congress explicitly invoked the ongoing debate about education on racial issues in their statements celebrating the legislation’s passage.

“Today, as we see a growing resentment of the true history of African Americans in this country, recognizing Juneteenth at the national level is an important step toward honoring the history and heritage of Black Americans,” said Cleaver, a senior member of the Congressional Black Caucus and the founder of the Kansas City chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

“Henceforth, it is my hope that Juneteenth National Independence Day will be seen as a day to commemorate the long, painful, proud, and purposeful history of African Americans in the United States, as well as a day to recommit to the work in civil rights that remains unfinished,” Cleaver said.

This story was updated to clarify the date of abolition in Missouri.

The Star’s Jeanne Kuang contributed to this story.