Louisiana marks a permanent state holiday each June because of a bill one first-term Baton Rouge state representative carried through the Legislature in 2021. Larry Selders, the Democratic state senator who wrote that law and went on to represent his hometown in both chambers of the Louisiana Legislature, died on July 7, 2026, in Baton Rouge. He was 44.

Selders arrived in politics from social work. He attended Louisiana State University Laboratory School, where he was among a small number of Black students in his class, an experience he said taught him to work across difference. "I went from being a majority in my neighborhood to being a minority at school," he told The Advocate in 2019. He earned a Bachelor of Science in social work from Southern University and A&M College in 2005, working through college at a group home for troubled adolescents run by former LSU basketball player Collis Temple Jr.

The decade that followed built the record he would eventually run on. Selders joined the board of the Baton Rouge Recreation and Park Commission in 2010 and served roughly nine years, including a stretch as treasurer overseeing its parks budget. He opened Focused Family Services, a Baton Rouge clinic treating substance abuse and mental health, and founded Selders Development Group, a real estate firm that renovated homes for sale or rent to low-income families, concentrated in Old South Baton Rouge.

In November 2019, Selders won a runoff for House District 67, succeeding term-limited Rep. Patricia Haynes Smith, and took office that January. "Everybody deserves an opportunity. We need an even playing field," he said after the win, according to The Advocate. Two years later, he wrote House Bill 554, which made the third Saturday in June a permanent Juneteenth holiday under Louisiana law. Signed in June 2021 as Act 128, the bill carried more than 40 coauthors, among them Sen. Cleo Fields, whose Baton Rouge Senate seat Selders would later win.

In February 2025, Selders won the special election for Senate District 14 with 62 percent of the vote, succeeding Fields, who had moved on to Congress, and was sworn in on March 11. The district he carried to the Senate floor stretched from LSU and Southern University through downtown Baton Rouge and into some of East Baton Rouge Parish's poorest neighborhoods, the same range of the city he had spent more than a decade serving as a caseworker, a parks commissioner, and a landlord to families who needed one. He sat on the Senate Finance Committee, the Labor and Industrial Relations Committee, and the Joint Legislative Committee on the Budget.

Word of his death moved quickly through a Legislature that considered him one of its own. Senate President Cameron Henry called him "a friend to all he worked with and represented, always smiling and positive in all he did," according to KATC. Sen. Regina Barrow, who authored the Juneteenth bill alongside him, called him "a gentle giant" who "definitely cared about children and their well-being," according to NOLA.com.

He is survived by his wife, Dr. Kendra Michael-Selders, and their two sons, Larry Jr. and Luke.

Selders held elected office for barely six years, but Baton Rouge kept more of him than that. Focused Family Services still treats patients on South Acadian Thruway. The homes his development company rebuilt in Old South Baton Rouge still house the families who bought or rented them. And every third Saturday in June, the state he represented observes a holiday that exists in Louisiana law because he wrote the bill that put it there.