Commemorated annually on June 19, Juneteenth is the oldest known celebration of the end of slavery in the United States. It was not until June 19, 1865, that the news reached the enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, that they were free. This was two years after President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, one year after the Senate passed the 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery, and six months after it was passed by the House. As noted in the official Proclamation making Juneteenth a federal holiday in 2021, “it is a day of profound weight and power.”
