On June 19, Americans around the country will celebrate Juneteenth, a holiday commemorating the Emancipation Proclamation in the USA.
It is the completion of the celebration of freedom in America,” said Steve Williams, president of the National Juneteenth Observance Foundation.
Here is what you should know about Juneteenth:
On June 19, 1865, Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger informed a reluctant community in Galveston, TX, that President Abraham Lincoln had freed enslaved Americans in rebel states two and a half years earlier.
“The date represents an important turning point for our nation and for human rights, and we believe that now, more than ever, it deserves to have its own day in the spotlight,” the tweet read:
President Donald Trump had planned to hold a campaign rally on Juneteenth in Tulsa, OK, the site of a massacre in 1921 when white men attacked and killed Black residents in a Black business district.
Though Juneteenth marks the day Texas was informed of the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing the slaves there as it had in other secessionist states, it did not apply to Union states, such as Maryland, which had slaves but had not seceded in the Civil War.
