Internal @NPR email: "Next year, in 2021, Juneteenth will be an official NPR paid holiday."

This is a really meaningful act by my @NPR colleagues. When people built Confederate statues, they promoted a certain view of the Civil War. When you make Juneteenth a holiday, it's like you're building a different statue, with a more accurate and inclusive meaning.

The only good thing about slavery is that it ended. That is also the one thing that justified the carnage of the Civil War. Hundreds of thousands of Americans, black and white, died on the way to that result, and Juneteenth is a war memorial that every living American can share.