Juneteenth, which has been a national holiday since 2021, marks the day when the Union Army entered the city of Galveston on June 19, 1865, and freed the slaves in Texas pursuant to President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which had gone into effect more than two years earlier on January 1,1863.
Juneteenth celebrations began as early as the following year and expanded over the decades, largely on the local level across the country, until President Joe Biden signed into law the official observance of Juneteenth as a federal holiday.
Juneteenth serves to remind us both of our nation’s tragic past and of the hope for a better future, as often was expressed by Dr. Martin Luther King: “”The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”