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On June 19, 1865 — Juneteenth — U.S. Army general Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, and announced General Order No. 3, proclaiming freedom for slaves in Texas, [26] which was the last state of the Confederacy with slavery. Juneteenth has been celebrated annually on June 19 ever since in various parts of the United States.
In the late 1970s, when the Texas Legislature declared Juneteenth a "holiday of significance ... particularly to the blacks of Texas," [50] it became the first state to establish Juneteenth as a state holiday. [66] The bill passed through the Texas Legislature in 1979 and was officially made a state holiday on January 1, 1980.
The order, and Granger's enforcement of it, is the central event commemorated by the holiday of Juneteenth, which originally celebrated the end of slavery in Texas. The order was not read aloud by the Union Army, but it was posted around town, and communicated to most African Americans by slavemasters. [1]
The holiday, often called America's second Independence Day, marks the emancipation of enslaved African Americans in Texas.
For more than one-and-a-half centuries, the Juneteenth holiday has been sacred to many Black communities. It marks the day in 1865 enslaved people in Galveston, Texas found out they had been freed ...
Juneteenth officially became a federal holiday in the United States on June 17, 2021—joining days such as Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday and the 4th of July as national holidays. Before it ...
The history of slavery in Texas began slowly at first during the first few phases in Texas' history. Texas was a colonial territory, then part of Mexico, later Republic in 1836, and U.S. state in 1845.
McEachern continued, referring to the day — June 19, 1865 — when Union troops arrived on the southeastern shore of Texas to declare the end of slavery, "Can you imagine that first free breath ...