Don't let Kevin Roberts ruin Juneteenth

Decently engage all of slavery’s legacies

Slavery historian and Heritage Foundation president Kevin D. Roberts (from his Heritage page).

Last year for Juneteenth, Ph.D. slavery historian and Heritage Foundation president Kevin D. Roberts published the brief essay “Don’t Let the Left Ruin Juneteenth’s True Meaning.” It comes across much like this year’s remarkably named Trump 2.0 executive order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” Roberts’s foundation created Project 2025, the guidelines for President Trump’s radical—and in my view, nihilistic—campaign to transform the federal government and the country.

Don’t let Kevin Roberts ruin Juneteenth. Like that executive order, his essay distorts the country’s struggle to engage all of slavery’s legacies decently.

And don’t mistake who Dr. Roberts is. Last September, the Los Angeles Review of Books published the article “The Inconvenient Scholarship of Kevin Roberts: Samuel G. Freedman traces the long and contradictory intellectual journey of the man behind Project 2025.” Columbia University journalism professor Freedman describes Roberts not only as a star in his earlier career in academe, but as a star on the subject of slavery, who got along quite well with colleagues—which bears noting, given Roberts’s hostility to universities now.

Professor Freedman writes, “In the nearly 20 years since Roberts left behind his career as a scholar of enslavement, he has periodically returned in speech and in writing to issues of race. His tone could hardly be more of a departure from the intricate, nuanced work on enslaved Black people that he had done as a graduate student.” Roberts’s 1999 Virginia Tech master’s thesis was African-Virginian Extended Kin: The Prevalence of West African Family Forms Among Slaves in Virginia, 1740–1870. His 2003 University of Texas Ph.D. dissertation was Slaves and slavery in Louisiana: the evolution of Atlantic world identities, 1791-1831. He landed a tenure-track position when almost nobody else could. But Professor Freedman concludes:

Long gone is the scholar who reckoned honorably with the United States’ original sin of enslavement. When Roberts speaks of wars these days, he refers not to the Civil War, with its prospect of emancipating the shackled and bestowing a “new birth of freedom” upon the United States. Instead, like radicals from the Tea Party movement to the January 6 insurrection, Roberts invokes the Revolutionary War, with both a promise and a threat. As he put it on Steve Bannon’s podcast: “[W]e are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the Left allows it to be.”

Roberts’s Heritage biography page calls the foundation “the nation’s premier conservative think tank” and “the most broadly supported … in the world, drawing support from more than 500,000 members.” The page declares his leadership “critical in pushing back on the radical, socialist agenda being advanced by the Left at all levels of government.”

His 2024 essay “Don’t Let the Left Ruin Juneteenth’s True Meaning” opens with three “key takeaways”:

1. Until the last four years, Juneteenth was an uncontroversial celebration of American freedom and the end of slavery in Texas.

2. The left has worked hard to co-opt the holiday and use it as a tool to divide their countrymen and to replace the real Independence Day.

3. We have an opportunity to reject racial divisions and the revisionist history of the ivory tower. It’s long past time conservatives start reclaiming our institutions.

The essay charges that “Democratic leaders … named the national holiday ‘Juneteenth National Independence Day,’ setting it up in opposition to July 4.” No doubt Democrats did choose the name. But by a vote of 415 to 14, the House of Representatives passed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act.

The essay presses the accusation of unpatriotically counterproductive opposition to the Fourth of July, presenting as its evidence the Guardian opinion piece Juneteenth—not the Fourth of July—was the real Independence Day by William and Mary Ph.D. candidate Kelsey Smoot. Yet with the approach of Juneteenth 2025, newspapers and the web are full of cheerful news about the impending holiday. Are Juneteenth-vs-Independence-Day scowlers lurking?

Smoot writes, “as I moved into adulthood, learned the expansive and ongoing history of American imperialism, experienced blatant racism, homophobia, and transphobia, and internalized that my ancestors were held in bondage and considered chattel far beyond the date and year that I was supposed to consider the demarcation of American ‘freedom,’ the idea of celebrating the holiday became untenable.”

Those aren’t rare, outlying views. Would Juneteenth really be a better national observance if President Trump succeeded in what his executive order calls restoration of his versions of “truth and sanity” in American history? Does Kevin Roberts’s condemnation of the turmoil following George Floyd’s police torture-murder mean that Americans who have been passionate about it—and who bring it up on Juneteenth—should just stifle?

The Roberts essay invokes two other opinion pieces in complaining that “activists have called for Juneteenth to be used to explore ‘racial trauma’ and enact reparations.”

For racial trauma, it cites the USA Today essay “Juneteenth holiday is America's chance to explore racial slavery and its lasting impact: Juneteenth can be our path to a new national consensus forged not by lies or half-truths, but by coming to terms with our history of racial trauma.” It’s by Peniel Joseph, the Barbara Jordan Chair in Ethics and Political Values and founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy in the LBJ School of Public Affairs at Roberts’s own University of Texas. That’s the caliber of at least one of the supposed antipatriots accused of seeking to “ruin Juneteenth’s true meaning.” Professor Joseph writes, “Juneteenth offers the rare chance to foster a new national consensus, one forged not through lies, evasions or half-truths, but through the crucible of coming to terms with the full depth and breadth of American histories of racial trauma that continue to haunt our country despite efforts by some to deny their very existence.”

For reparations, it’s the Brookings Institution post “Why Juneteenth is a rallying cry for reparations” by Rashawn Ray, Brookings senior fellow and University of Maryland sociology professor. He writes:

As we celebrate Juneteenth, we have a lot of work to do as a nation to make-up for Black plight since 1619. Black people’s Americanness has never been fully acknowledged. We have fought in every war and died to defend a utopian way of life that we never truly benefited from. We love America, but America has never truly loved us back. Reparations is the only path toward true racial equity in the United States of America.

The link in that last sentence is to a longer Brookings piece by Professor Ray and a Brookings coauthor, Andre M. Perry: “Why we need reparations for Black Americans.” Myself, I’ve long been unpersuaded by reparations advocacy, but I’m fully persuaded that that’s no reason to complain—I think counterproductively—that some Americans are exercising their right to frame the concept together with Juneteenth.

Roberts asserts, “Americans are souring on Juneteenth. What they hear from the media and elected leaders on Juneteenth is a self-righteous, anti-American drumbeat of criticism and division. Most Americans are excluded from the celebration, as is anyone who believes in America’s founding or doesn’t buy the narrative that America is ‘systemically racist’ today.”

But blessedly, he ascends from that tone to write that Juneteenth “celebrates what Lincoln called ‘a new birth of freedom’ for America. It celebrates the completion of the work of July 4, 1776—the extension of liberty to all Americans. It also commemorates the untold numbers of young men who died in the war fighting for that freedom.”

Exactly. And as an accomplished historian of slavery who understands all of that—and who, according to Professor Freedman, once valued the Black self-agency of slavery days—historian Roberts could add something like this: “And Juneteenth celebrants should begin expressly commemorating the multitudes of enterprising, risk-taking Civil War slavery escapees, the self-emancipators, who figured centrally in the war’s transition from a struggle for union to a struggle for both union and freedom—people who were among the most American of all Americans.”¹

1. I advocated this myself in a Juneteenth 2024 Atlanta Journal-Constitution op-ed. I hope Dr. Roberts reads it.