For the fifth time, the United States is commemorating Juneteenth as a national holiday. June 19 marks the date, in 1865, when enslaved people in Texas were emancipated following the Civil War. Though Juneteenth is the newest national holiday, it might be the most important U.S. holiday, and one that was overdue to garner recognition at the federal level.
Though the Southern Confederate states had surrendered to Union forces on April 9, 1865, slavery persisted in Texas for months thereafter. This was partly because Texas was distant from much of the heaviest fighting of the war, so many slaveholders fled there as Union troops advanced. It was not until June that Union troops arrived in Galveston to enforce the emancipation of enslaved people.
Technically, Texas was not the last state where emancipation took effect, as Kentucky and Delaware, two Union “border states” during the war, continued to permit slavery until the end of 1865. But the events in Texas were significant, as they marked the final defeat of slavery in the Confederacy. Since then, it has been celebrated in much of the United States, particularly in African American communities, and even Texas adopted it as a state holiday in 1979. But it was not until 2021 that then-President Joe Biden officially declared it a national holiday.