In Indianapolis, Juneteenth event organizers announced that they were pausing the parade, but would still host other events throughout the month to celebrate. “We were ultimately denied by public safety officials due to reported concerns from nearby residents, despite similar events taking place in that area in the past,” Indy Juneteenth Inc. Executive Director James Webb told CNN.
In West Virginia, Republican governor Patrick Morrisey’s office announced that the state wouldn’t host any Juneteenth events this year for the first time since 2017. The stop was due to “continued fiscal challenges,” according to deputy press secretary Drew Galang. However, just last month, Morrisey signed a bill to end all diversity programs.
“Businesses pulling back and universities canceling programs in response to attacks on DEI shows that many institutions and corporations were never truly committed to diversity and inclusion,” LaTasha Levy, a professor of Afro-American Studies at Howard University, told CNN. “I think it really affirms what we’ve already known. There are too many entities in our country who are not serious about freedom and liberation.”
Trump’s move to target the National Endowment for the Arts earlier this year impacted other Juneteenth Day celebrations. The endowment provides hundreds of millions of dollars each year to individuals and institutions around the country, including those hosting Juneteenth events.
The Cooper Family Foundation, which throws one of the largest Juneteenth celebrations in San Diego each year, was told by the NEA in May that its $25,000 grant was being taken away. Maliya Jones, who works for the foundation, said that the email they received said the event no longer aligned with the agency’s priorities. The organization, which will still host the event, was forced to figure out alternative funding at the last minute. “We will always have Juneteenth,” Marla Cooper, who leads the foundation, said, “And we will work it out.”
A museum in Fredericksburg, Virginia, also had to scale back its Juneteenth celebration because of cuts from the National Endowment for the Arts.
The museum’s grant was retracted on April 29th, “well after planning begun for this year’s festivities,” the president and CEO of the Fredericksburg Area Museum, Sam McKelvey, told CNN. “We are still holding a much smaller event with the museum in the red, but the community has stepped up for us and allowed us to make it still happen.”
Despite leading the push against diversity initiatives harming Juneteenth celebrations across the nation, Trump, in his first term, claimed that he ought to receive credit for popularizing the celebration.
In 2020, Trump planned a rally on June 19 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the site of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. After receiving criticism, he pushed it back a day—though not before saying he had helped make Juneteenth “famous.”
“I did something good: I made Juneteenth very famous,” Trump told The Wall Street Journal in reference to the rally date. “It’s actually an important event, an important time. But nobody had ever heard of it.”
