Juneteenth

Juneteenth, a blend of June and 19th, commemorates the day in 1865, two months after the Confederate states surrendered to end the US Civil War, when a Union general arrived in Texas to inform a group of enslaved African Americans of their freedom under President Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation.

Confederate soldiers surrendered in April 1865, but word did not reach the last enslaved Black people until June 19 when Union soldiers brought the news of freedom to Galveston.

Slavery was permanently abolished six months later when Georgia ratified the 13th Amendment of the US Constitution. And the next year, the now-free people of Galveston started celebrating Juneteenth, an observance that has continued and spread around the world.