After becoming an official holiday in 2021 thanks to an executive order from President Joe Biden, Juneteenth will be observed as a federal holiday on June 20, 2022.
Juneteenth commemorates the day on when the final Confederate colony of enslaved Americans in Galveston, Texas, got word that they had been emancipated from slavery on June 19, 1865. In Galveston, Union General Gordon Granger led the regiment tasked with enforcing the proclamation.
News of the proclamation was slow to reach Texas in the years leading up to Granger’s arrival, and it didn’t reach some areas at all. Slaveowners in other regions kept the news buried in order to keep slavery alive.
While the Emancipation Proclamation had released enslaved people more than two years before, Union troops did not have the strength to enforce General Order No. 3 throughout the former Confederate states until the end of the Civil War.
Following the Reformation Amendments, African Americans’ freedoms and privileges were progressively enhanced.
The 13th Amendment abolished slavery throughout the United States; the 14th Amendment established citizenship, due process, and equal protection; and the 15th Amendment established the right to vote and hold public office.
Juneteenth, on the other hand, was always a hallowed site for people who had lived through the horrors of slavery and bigotry. In Texas, many previously enslaved African Americans and their descendants continued to commemorate Juneteenth, with some making pilgrimages to Galveston to do so.
Since 1980, Juneteenth has been an official holiday in Texas.
President Biden noted in his proclamation of the official federal holiday, “Juneteenth is a day that all Americans should remember for its celebration of freedom…
A day to commemorate the moral stain and awful toll of slavery on our country, which I’ve long referred to as “America’s original sin.”
Systemic racism, inequality, and inhumanity have a long history. But it’s also a day that reminds us of our remarkable ability to heal, hope, and rise with purpose and resolution from our darkest circumstances.”