Good morning. Welcome to ACTS Today. It's Thursday, June 17th. I'm Nyla Blue. Here's what you need to know today.

Culture clash at the Southern Baptist Convention. Plus, the FAA gets serious about unruly passengers.

But first, today's one big thing. Congress approves a new federal holiday.

June 10th.

The House voted yesterday to make June 10th a federal holiday after the Senate unanimously did so on Tuesday.

June 10th commemorates the end of slavery in the U.S., falling on the day in 1865 that enslaved African Americans in Galveston, Texas learned they were free.

More than two years after emancipation was announced.

With so much renewed attention around this holiday, I asked author and historian Dr. Ibrahim X. Kendi to talk this through with me.

He's also the host of the new Bee Anti-Racist Podcast from our partners over at Pushkin.

Dr. Kendi, welcome to ACTS Today. Thank you for making the time to speak with us.

Oh, thank you so much for having me.

In your writings, you've often said that it's critically important to distinguish between abolishing slavery and actually freeing people.

Why do you think that many people might overlook that distinction?

Unfortunately, we're just not really taught about with a tremendous amount of complexity and detail, the Civil War or even the post-Civil War period, in which you had formally enslaved people saying to the U.S. government,

we live in an agricultural, cultural society, we're not going to be able to be free if we don't have land.

So we need our 40 acres and it was clear as day to them and obviously that did not happen.

How do you think the establishing of a federal holiday might help our education as a nation to know more about this?

Well, what I'm hoping is that this federal holiday would allow us every single year to take a step back, especially those who aren't able to study and understand and talk about it full time.

Basically, the 200, literally 250 years in which black people were enslaved in this country in the 250 years of resistance against slavery.

And so it will be a time of memory of that terror and Indian memory of the celebrating of people who fought for so long to be free.

Do you think celebrate is the appropriate word to use for Juneteenth?

I think I celebrate people who have fought to be free.

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