Juneteenth

The history behind Juneteenth you might not have known

• Juneteenth is the oldest nationally celebrated commemoration of the ending of slavery in the United States.
• In 1865, there were an estimated 250,000 enslaved people in Texas.
• The Union soldiers, led by Major General Gordon Granger, landed at Galveston, Texas, with news that the war had ended and that the enslaved were now free. Note that this was 2 1/2 years after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which had become official Jan. 1, 1863.
• Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation Sept. 22, 1862.
• It became effective on Jan. 1, 1863.
• On April 9, 1865, Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House in Virginia.
• The western Army of the Trans-Mississippi did not surrender until June 2.
• On June 19, 1865, Union troops arrive with news that America’s Civil War is over and that all slaves in the defeated South are free.
• The inscription on the statue reads: “On June 19, 1865, at the close of the Civil War, U.S. Army General Gordon Granger issued an order in Galveston stating that the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation was in effect.”Although the event is popularly thought of as “the end of slavery,” emancipation for those enslaved in two Union border states — Delaware and Kentucky — would not come until several months later, on Dec. 18, 1865, when ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment was announced.
• Juneteenth was first celebrated in Austin in 1867 in the support of the Freedmen’s Bureau, assisting freedmen in the South.
• The freedom of formerly enslaved people in Texas was given final legal status in a series of Texas Supreme Court decisions between 1868 and 1874.
• On Jan. 1, 1980, Juneteenth officially became a Texas state holiday.