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Editor's notebook: A review of Tennessee’s celebratory proclamations shows a mixed bag • Tennessee Lookout [1]
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Date: 2025-02-17
My journey down a state rabbit hole began with a question from a colleague: Does Gov. Bill Lee recognize Black History Month with a proclamation?
Of course he does, I thought. For nearly 50 years, February has officially been Black History Month in the U.S., and the roots of the celebration date back to the 1920s.
In 1976, President Gerald Ford, a Republican, designated February as Black History Month, marking official efforts started by Black scholar Carter Woodson.
Woodson sent out a press release in February 1926 announcing “Black History Week.” He selected the month because of the birthdays of President Abraham Lincoln, who signed the Emancipation Proclamation that freed enslaved people, and abolitionist Frederick Douglass on Feb. 14.
But review of proclamations issued by Tennessee’s last two governors — Lee and Gov. Bill Haslam, who served from 2010 to 2018 — shows only three years in which the month was officially recognized.
Lee issued Black History Month proclamations in 2019 — his first year in office — and in 2023. Haslam recognized the occasion in 2013.
I reached out to Lee’s office to ask why he selected the years he did to formally recognize the month and how the governor decides which proclamations to issue. While I was asking questions, I also asked if Lee would continue to recognize Juneteenth — the holiday commemorating the end of slavery in 1865 — and Rev. Martin Luther King’s January birthday, given President Donald Trump’s ban on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in the federal workplace and Lee’s support of Trump.
Several federal agencies, including the Department of Defense and the CIA have paused recognition of Black History Month, MLK Day and Juneteenth — as well as Holocaust Remembrance Day and LGBTQ Pride Month — even as Trump signed a proclamation noting Black History Month.
Elizabeth Johnson, Lee’s spokesperson, noted that Trump marked Juneteenth in the final year of first administration, and the Tennessee General Assembly established Juneteenth as a state holiday in 2021.
“There is no reason to believe that a federal or state holiday would not be observed in accordance with the law,” Johnson said in a statement.
She did not respond to my question about formal recognition of Black History Month.
As I continued my search of the state’s gubernatorial proclamations, I noted Lee and Haslam recognized Robert E. Lee, a Virginia native who led the Confederate Army in the Civil War, for his birthday seven times since 2010, the last time in 2020.
According to the proclamations, Tennessee Code Annotated requires that Lee be celebrated by the state each Jan. 19, noting Lee’s service to the Confederacy.
Nathan Bedford Forrest, another Confederate general who is widely recognized as an early leader of the Ku Klux Klan, received recognition from the state eight times since 2010. Lee last honored Forrest in 2019, two years before a bust of Forrest was bounced out of the state Capitol, so perhaps there’s been some evolution on Lee’s part.
To Lee’s credit, he has marked Juneteenth, the commemoration of the end of slavery in 1865, each year since he was inaugurated save for 2019, although the federal government didn’t designate the day a federal holiday until 2021.
But Martin Luther King Jr. Day, which has been a federal holiday since President Ronald Reagan signed it into law in 1983, has only been noted with a proclamation twice in recent years: 2023 and 2024.
Speaking of Reagan, Tennessee annually marks the Feb. 6 birthday of the former Republican president for, among other things, his “commitment to an active social policy agenda for the nation’s children (that) helped lower crime and drug use in our neighborhoods.”
That sounds nice, but many Americans remember Reagan’s “war on drugs” through less rose-colored glasses. Reagan popularized the racist urban myth of the “welfare queen” and his economic policies hit Black families particularly hard.
According to Johnson, proclamations are issued at the request of constituents — although at the discretion of the governor, according to a form on the state website.
Hispanic History Month — September — gained recognition six times since 2010, Confederate Decoration Day was honored seven times, all but one on Haslam’s watch.
I give Lee credit for at least dropping the honors granted to Confederate leaders and holidays, but while I appreciate his spokesperson’s optimism about observing other holidays, I remain skeptical.
I have reservations that Lee — who traveled to Washington recently for a photo opp with Trump in celebration of a new private school voucher law that will most likely help Tennessee’s affluent — has the best interests of the state’s minorities and poor at heart.
But as the old saying goes, hope springs eternal. And it’s still mid-February. It’s not too late for Lee to recognize the many contributions of Black Tennesseans to the state’s “storied history,” to use his phrase.
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