This June on the 19th, many Americans will gather to celebrate Junteenth, now the newest federal holiday in the United States.
, now the newest federal holiday in the United States. Though it’s been celebrated by Black Americans as early as in the mid-late 1800s, Juneteenth is a date that was long omitted from history books—and wasn’t designated as a federal holiday until 2021, after police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other Black people in the U.S. renewed a push for conversations on racial justice and the holiday’s enshrinement on a national level.
Many Americans might not know why the date is significant or even celebrated, since many might not have learned about the event in school. “Many people assume that freedom began with the Emancipation Proclamation and think of Lincoln as the great liberator,” says Berry. that"all persons held as slaves" in the Confederacy or states that seceded from the Union,"are, and henceforward shall be free.
“When the Union army reached Galveston and notified Black people of their freedom, it generally signified that the last segment of the roughly four million slaves in the South, now knew they were officially free,” Nafeesa Muhammad, Associate Professor of History at Spelman College, told TIME in an email. “And this is the significance of Juneteenth.”
Though Juneteenth doesn’t mark the official end of slavery, it’s a day that provides an opportunity to examine and reflect on the entire history of slavery and the struggle for freedom—a struggle that continued on with the passage of Jim Crow that passed soon after the Civil War.
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