Wednesday marks the fourth annual observance in the United States of Juneteenth, a federal holiday that commemorates the emancipation of enslaved Black people at the end of the Civil War.
President Joe Biden signed legislation making Juneteenth a federal holiday on June 17, 2021. It went into effect immediately.
The holiday's name stems from June 19, 1865, when U.S. Army Major General Gordon Granger marched into Galveston, Texas, and informed an estimated 250,000 enslaved people that they were free after four years of war between the victorious Union army of the U.S. North and the Southern Confederate states.
Granger's order enforced the Emancipation Proclamation signed on January 1, 1863, by then-President Abraham Lincoln that freed more than 3 million enslaved Black people throughout the Confederacy but did not truly take effect until the end of the war, after the Confederacy surrendered.
Black communities commemorated the date as the actual end of slavery in private celebrations throughout the following century. The first official observance of Juneteenth came in 1980, when Texas declared it a state holiday. Other communities in the U.S. slowly began to adopt the annual observance as a public holiday, eventually leading to all 50 states and the District of Columbia now recognizing the day in some form.
"Juneteenth, and by extension, Black History Month, are not just one day or one-month events," said Portia Hopkins, a historian at Rice University. "We would love to see Juneteenth celebrations, including buying from Black businesses, investing in Black real estate, thinking about ways that we can empower and embolden the Black community."
The drive to make Juneteenth a federal holiday gained momentum during the Black Lives Matter movement against racism and police brutality, especially after the murder of African American George Floyd by a white Minneapolis police officer in 2020.
"I would really love to see Juneteenth curriculum be added to public education," Hopkins said. "In Texas, and in many states across the nation, they have what's called a Celebrate Freedom Week, where they look at foundational documents like the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Why not add General Order No. 3 to that and really allow the students to think about what freedom means in different contexts and to different people in this great nation of ours?"
General Order No. 3 is the 1865 decree that ended slavery in Texas.
Much of the success in galvanizing support for a national holiday is credited to Opal Lee, a retired Black teacher and activist known as "the grandmother of Juneteenth." As a child, she witnessed a group of 500 white supremacists vandalize and burn her family's home to the ground.
In 2016, at the age 89, she began a walking campaign, traveling hundreds of kilometers from her hometown of Fort Worth, Texas, to Washington, D.C., to press for a Juneteenth federal holiday. Her efforts became a reality in 2021, when President Biden signed legislation passed by Congress marking Juneteenth as the 11th nationally recognized holiday.
In a proclamation recognizing this year's Juneteenth as "a day of observance," Biden said Juneteenth "not only marks the end of America's original sin of slavery but also the beginning of the work at the heart and soul of our Nation: making the promise of America real for every American."
