There’s a chance we could get a video package for the United States of America’s newest official federal holiday on SmackDown tonight, June 19 — or Juneteenth, the date in 1865 when the victorious* Union army arrived on Galveston island in Texas to inform the slaves there they’d been legally freed two years earlier by the Emancipation Proclamation, the last human beings freed from bondage at the end of the American Civil War.
But I’m guessing that WWE will skip it again this year, just as they have
Black History Month the past couple years. And like last year, it will again fall on the men and women who are under contract to WWE to acknowledge what this day means about our country, its founding and history, and the imperfect ways we’ve tried to grow while many of us fought to return to our past in order to recommit the same sins over and over again.
Stories and rumors of prejudice and racism in wrestling and at WWE are easy to find, but we don’t bring this up as evidence that WWE or any particular person there is racist or prejudiced. Nor is this about pointing out that their other big U.S. based pro wrestling company did recognize Juneteenth again this year, although AEW did.
I won’t even get on my “unchecked capitalism f’n sucks” soapbox (or set it up any higher than this, anyway) other than to point that WWE and Cricket did kinda acknowledge today’s holiday when they sent Trick Williams out on a Juneteenth-related public relations trip to Brooklyn’s MoCADA, the Museum of African Diasporan Art. This video went up yesterday:
Mostly, we just wanted to recognize a solemn occasion that commemorates a shameful-yet-crucial step America took as a nation 167 years ago. Doing so allows us to remember that the work of building a more perfect union will never be done, that that’s a feature and not a bug of our Republic, and that our little corner of the pro wrestling world believes its important to do so… whether WWE does or not.
* It’s important to remind folks that the anti-slavery side won.
