Today, America is marking its newest federal holiday, Juneteenth Day of Observance. It marks the advance of liberty, but many will miss out on the joy, embracing the defeatist notion that anything short of perfection isn’t worthy of celebration.

On June 19, 1865, Major General Gordon Granger of New York arrived at Galveston to take command of the District of Texas, holding the torch of liberty that had fallen from President Lincoln’s hands, aware that how Reconstruction was executed would decide if the slaveocracy remained buried or rose from the dead.

It’s common these days to mumble a defensive “America isn’t perfect” on occasions of national pride, as if our nation wasn’t founded by men mindful of human shortcomings who set out not to create utopia, but to form a “more perfect union” with each passing generation.

It would’ve been easy for Granger to focus on appeasing white citizens, going soft on them at the expense of the Freedmen as President Andrew Johnson did in the doomed hope that the Democratic Party would reward him with its 1868 presidential nomination.

Instead, on that first day, Granger enforced emancipation. “The people of Texas,” he wrote in General Order No. 3, “are informed that in accordance with a proclamation from the executive of the United States, all slaves are free.”

Remember that line when cynics snark that Lincoln’s 1862 Emancipation Proclamation was meaningless since it applied only to states in rebellion. Without it, Granger’s order — and that first Juneteenth celebration by the 250,000 Galvestonians it freed — would never have happened.

Granger stressed that he meant “absolute equality,” erasing the Declaration of Independence’s unspoken caveat which read, like the one in George Orwell’s communist allegory, “Animal Farm,” that “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

In 1912, the Sun invited Black leaders to comment on the fiftieth anniversary of emancipation. Booker T. Washington reflected that it had “benefited two races in the South rather than one,” and America was “just beginning to realize to what extent both races were fettered in their growth by reason of slavery.”

The nation, Washington contended, was beginning to “realize how much more can be accomplished through free labor, free thinking, and free speaking than through slavery.”

Washington sought to inspire subsequent generations to address the imperfections his could not overcome, predicting that “the next fifty years will show a greater degree of progress than has already been shown.” W.E.B. Du Bois’s essay followed with the same theme.

“Yesterday,” Du Bois wrote, Black Americans “were given partial emancipation; tomorrow, they will take complete freedom.” He lived until 1963, the year Dr. Martin Luther King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech imagining a brighter future.

The byline of an assistant attorney general, William Lewis — the first Black man appointed to that post — appeared next. “The social and political status of the emancipated slave and his descendants is not what it should be,” he said. Many “are deprived of ordinary natural justice, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

However, Lewis didn’t think those shortcomings erased progress, writing “nowhere else in the world does an equal number of persons of the African race enjoy so large a measure of freedom and opportunity as here in America.”

Juneteenth is a celebration of Granger’s one giant leap for freedom, but also of the millions who made small steps in the cause. Some of their names are chiseled on Grand Army of the Republic gravestones. Others are recorded only as an X in slave ledgers.

Americans do not mark this holiday to tally their imperfections in despair. It’s branded on the calendar to celebrate the progress they made and to inspire us to carry on their work, not to create utopia today, but to build on their work to create a union that’s more perfect tomorrow than it was yesterday.