Taylor Schlitz: When Trump’s birthday matters more than Black freedom

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It was during a daylong seminar on how to eliminate bias in the law that I saw the news alert. I had not gone looking for the story, but it found me. We had spent the morning talking about how people inside the legal system can still push it toward fairness in a moment like this. On a short break, I glanced at my phone and saw the headline:

“National Parks are now free on Trump’s birthday, but not on MLK Jr. Day or Juneteenth.”

I closed the article, then opened it again, because it sounded like a bad joke. Was this from the Onion?

My first reaction was not anger. It was that heavy feeling in your chest when something confirms what you kept hoping was not true. Here I was in a room devoted to eliminating bias, listening to respected voices talk about widening the circle of justice, while at the same time the federal government was quietly narrowing it. Of course it would be Juneteenth. Of course it would be Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Of course one of the days that was added to the list would be the president’s own birthday, folded into Flag Day and patriotic branding.

Sitting there with colleagues and students, I thought about how rare it is for this country to admit that freedom has never arrived everywhere at the same time. Juneteenth is the only federal holiday built around that uncomfortable truth. It exists because enslaved people in Texas did not learn they were free until more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. The holiday is a note in the margins of our history that says, in plain language, we were late. We should have done better.

I grew up in Tarrant County, Texas, where Juneteenth is not abstract. It is elders telling the truth about slavery. It is church announcements, family reunions and kids running through parks that smell like barbecue and summer heat. When I became a social studies teacher back home, I invited Lee, who was well into her 90s, to my school. I can still see my students, leaning forward as she described walking two and a half miles every year as part of her campaign to make Juneteenth a federal holiday to represent the two and a half years it took for news of freedom to reach enslaved people in Texas. She told them that freedom is unfinished work, something each generation has to pick up. Afterward they lined up for hugs and photos. A few whispered to me that they had never met someone who changed the whole country before.

On this year’s Juneteenth, President Donald Trump chose not to issue a proclamation. Instead he went on Truth Social to complain that America has “too many non-working holidays” that are costing the country “billions of dollars,” and warned that soon there would be a holiday for every working day. He did this on the day we mark the end of slavery. I did not experience that as a neutral comment about productivity. I heard it as a complaint that my community’s freedom story is too expensive.

Now, with the National Park Service’s new schedule for 2026, Juneteenth and Martin Luther King Jr. Day have been erased from the list of free days. In their place, the Trump administration has created a new slate of “resident only patriotic fee-free days” that includes Presidents’ Day, Memorial Day, the National Park Service’s 110th birthday, Constitution Day, Theodore Roosevelt’s birthday and, most strikingly, Flag Day/Trump’s birthday. Veterans Day is the only day that remains from the old list.

I keep picturing someone in a federal office, cursor blinking over “Juneteenth” and “MLK Day,” pressing delete and typing in the sitting president’s birthday instead. On a spreadsheet, it is a small act. Sitting in that seminar last week with “Elimination of Bias” across the top of the program, it felt like something much larger. It felt like my own country looking at the one holiday that admits freedom came late, looking at the day we honor a man who died trying to make that freedom real, and deciding that a celebration of one politician matters more than either of those truths.

We do not have the luxury of treating this as a clumsy oversight. We are watching a pattern.

Last week those same neighbors watched the president sit at the head of a table and repeatedly call Somalis “garbage,” say “we do not want them in our country,” and tell them to go back to “where they came from and fix it,” while his Cabinet applauded and his vice president pumped his fist. For me, that moment sits in the same mental file as his Juneteenth post and the national park calendar change. Our holidays are wasteful. Our histories are optional. Our very presence is something he wants to throw away.

So when I look at the decision to strip Juneteenth and MLK Day off the free list and slide the president’s birthday into their place, I do not see a bureaucratic mix up. I see the same impulse. It is unpresidential. It is a policy expression of anti-Blackness. And it is another reminder that this administration is not just arguing over budgets or park passes. It is trying to seize control of the story of who matters as Americans.

I keep coming back to Opal Lee’s words. Freedom is for everybody. None of us are free until we are all free. Make yourself a committee of one.

As a young Black woman who grew up in her orbit and now writes from the state that became a global symbol after George Floyd’s murder, I feel the weight of that charge. I am tired of the constant drip of decisions that chip away at the parts of our national story that look like me and my neighbors. I am angry that my former students will see a president put his birthday where their holiday once was and hear him call their Somali classmates garbage. I am also clear that pretending this is normal would be its own kind of erasure.