Juneteenth

• 1. Introduction

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  Juneteenth takes its name from a portmanteau of June and nineteenth, first coined in the 1890s. The day it commemorates is the 19th of June 1865, when Major General Gordon Granger arrived on the island of Galveston, Texas. The Emancipation Proclamation had already been in effect for 900 days. Robert E. Lee had surrendered 71 days earlier. An estimated 250,000 people in Texas were still enslaved. Texas, the most remote state of the former Confederacy, had seen too few Union troops for enforcement of the Proclamation to take hold. Why did this particular delay, in this particular state, become the moment that African Americans across the country chose to commemorate? And how did a celebration that nearly vanished under Jim Crow pressure and Great Depression hardship survive to become a federal holiday in 2021?

• 2. The Last Stronghold

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  Planters fleeing the Civil War fighting in eastern states had migrated into Texas, bringing enslaved people with them. This migration swelled the state's enslaved population by the thousands. More than 1,000 of that population already lived in Galveston or Houston by 1860. The western Confederate Army of the Trans-Mississippi did not formally surrender until the 2nd of June, 1865. That was more than seven weeks after Lee's defeat. The gap between military collapse and actual federal enforcement left Texas in a prolonged state of legal limbo.

  General Order No. 3, posted in Galveston on June 19, declared not only that enslaved people were free. It also decreed that the relationship between former masters and enslaved people was now "that between employer and hired labor." The order instructed freedmen to remain at their homes and work for wages. It warned they would not be "supported in idleness either there or elsewhere."

  A popular legend holds that General Granger read the order aloud from the second-story balcony of Ashton Villa. No historical evidence supports this claim. All indications are that copies of the ordinance were posted in public places. These included the Negro Church on Broadway, since renamed Reedy Chapel A.M.E. Church.

  The Thirteenth Amendment was not ratified until the 6th of December, 1865, leaving the remaining enslaved people in Delaware and Kentucky still unfree. The amendment also freed approximately 16 elderly individuals still held under chattel slavery and indentured servitude in New Jersey. Thousands more enslaved people held by the Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Seminole tribes remained unfree beyond 1865. Those nations were forced to sign new Reconstruction treaties in late 1866. The freedom of formerly enslaved people in Texas was given full state law status only gradually. A series of Texas Supreme Court decisions between 1868 and 1874 settled the question.

• 3. Purchasing Freedom's Ground

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  One year after General Order No. 3, freedmen in Texas organized what they called Jubilee Day, the first annual commemoration of their freedom. The date was the 19th of June 1866. These early gatherings served a practical political purpose. They were used as rallies where newly freed African Americans received voting instructions.

  Black people across parts of Texas were barred from using public parks by state-sponsored segregation. Freed people responded by pooling their funds to purchase land for their celebrations. Austin held its first Juneteenth in 1867, organized under the auspices of the Freedmen's Bureau. By 1872, Black leaders in Texas had raised $1,000 to purchase 10 acres of land in Houston. That parcel is still known as Emancipation Park.

  In Limestone County, an estimated 30,000 Black people celebrated at Booker T. Washington Park, established in 1898 specifically for Juneteenth gatherings. The word "Juneteenth" appeared in print as early as 1891, in the Brenham Weekly Banner, a white newspaper from Brenham, Texas. By 1909, mentions of Juneteenth celebrations had appeared in Shreveport, Louisiana, the first known record of the holiday outside Texas.

  From 1890 to 1908, Texas and all former Confederate states passed new constitutions or amendments that effectively disenfranchised Black people. These measures struck at the political foundations on which Juneteenth had first been built.

• 4. Carried Across America

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  Gladys L. Knight wrote that part of the decline of Juneteenth celebrations came from "upwardly mobile blacks... who were ashamed of their slave past and aspired to assimilate into mainstream culture." Younger generations, more removed from the experience of slavery, were occupied with school and other pursuits. Those who moved north often found they could not take the time off or had simply let the tradition go.

  The Great Depression forced many Black people off Southern farms and into cities, making a holiday from work even harder to observe. From 1936 to 1951, the Texas State Fair in Dallas served as a focal point for the holiday's revival. An estimated 150,000 to 200,000 people marked Juneteenth in Dallas in 1936. In 1938, Governor James Allred issued a proclamation shifting the state's emancipation observance to June 20. That year, June 19 fell on a Sunday. Seventy thousand people attended a Juneteenth Jamboree in Dallas in 1951.

  Between 1940 and 1970, more than 5 million Black people left Texas, Louisiana, and other parts of the South. This second wave of the Great Migration carried Juneteenth with it. As historian Isabel Wilkerson writes, "The people from Texas took Juneteenth Day to Los Angeles, Oakland, Seattle, and other places they went." Wesley Johnson, a migrant from Texas, introduced the holiday to San Francisco in 1945.

  The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s redirected attention toward integration. Juneteenth observances declined again outside Texas as a result. A reversal came with the 1968 Poor People's Campaign in Washington, D.C., organized by Rev. Ralph Abernathy and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The SCLC designated June 19 as "Solidarity Day of the Poor People's Campaign." By 1974, Houston had resumed large-scale celebrations. Fort Worth followed the next year, drawing roughly 30,000 people to Sycamore Park. The 1978 Milwaukee celebration drew more than 100,000 attendees.

  By the late 1980s, major Juneteenth celebrations had taken root in California, Wisconsin, Illinois, Georgia, and Washington, D.C. In 1994, community leaders gathered at Christian Unity Baptist Church in New Orleans to work toward greater national celebration of Juneteenth.

• 5. What the Day Looks Like

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  Historian Mitch Kachun identifies three goals that have always driven Juneteenth celebrations: "to celebrate, to educate, and to agitate." The holiday has been called both "the longest-running African-American holiday" and "America's second Independence Day."

  Traditions include public readings of the Emancipation Proclamation and the singing of "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" and "Lift Every Voice and Sing." Works by Ralph Ellison and Maya Angelou are read at many gatherings. Barbecue serves as the centerpiece of most celebrations. Red food and drink are traditional at Juneteenth tables, including red velvet cake and strawberry soda. Red is meant to represent resilience and joy.

  Formerly enslaved people and their descendants once made pilgrimages to Galveston, Texas. That tradition of return gave the holiday a physical anchor in geography. Modern celebrations spread across picnics, street fairs, blues festivals, historical reenactments, family reunions, and Miss Juneteenth pageant contests. Voter registration drives frequently accompany the day's events.

  Ralph Ellison published a short story titled "Juneteenth" in the Quarterly Review of Literature in 1965. It was an excerpt from his novel in progress and brought the holiday to wider literary attention. His novel of the same name was published posthumously in 1999. Television widened that audience further, through episodes of Atlanta in 2016 and Black-ish in 2017. The Black-ish episode featured musical numbers by Aloe Blacc, The Roots, and Fonzworth Bentley. In 2018, Apple added Juneteenth to the official U.S. holidays section of iOS calendars.

  The Mascogos are descendants of Black Seminoles who escaped from slavery in 1852 and settled in Coahuila, Mexico. They mark June 19 as el Dia de los Negros. In 2020, Twitter, the National Football League, Nike, and Google Calendar all formally recognized Juneteenth. The 2020 film Miss Juneteenth followed an African-American mother and daughter navigating the holiday's pageant culture. The film reflected how fully Juneteenth had grown into a living American institution.

• 6. Road to Recognition

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  In 1979, Democratic State Representative Al Edwards of Houston sponsored legislation making Juneteenth a paid state holiday in Texas. Texas was the first state in the nation to take that step. Edwards also launched an annual prayer breakfast and commemorative celebration at Ashton Villa that same year. A local historian dressed as General Granger reads General Order No. 3 from the second-story balcony at each event. Edwards died of natural causes on the 29th of April, 2020, at the age of 83. His son Jason Edwards has continued the tradition in his place.

  The first federal legislation to recognize Juneteenth was introduced in 1996 by Representative Barbara-Rose Collins of Michigan, as H.J. Res. 195. Congress acknowledged the day the following year through Senate Joint Resolution 11 and House Joint Resolution 56. Official federal recognition, however, remained out of reach for decades.

  Activist Opal Lee, widely called the "grandmother of Juneteenth," spent decades campaigning for a federal holiday. In 2016-17, at the age of 89, she led a symbolic walk from Fort Worth, Texas, to Washington, D.C. In 2013, the Senate had passed Senate Resolution 175, acknowledging the late Lula Briggs Galloway, president of the National Association of Juneteenth Lineage. The resolution recognized her work in building national recognition for the holiday. By 2016-45 states were formally recognizing the occasion.

  The racial justice movement that intensified after the murder of George Floyd on the 25th of May, 2020, accelerated the legislative push. On the 15th of June, 2021, the Senate unanimously passed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act. The bill was spurred on by Opal Lee and the Congressional Black Caucus. The House passed it the next day by a vote of 415 to 14. President Joe Biden signed it on the 17th of June, 2021. Opal Lee was standing beside him.

  Juneteenth became the eleventh American federal holiday and the first new one since Martin Luther King Jr. Day was designated in 1983. In January 2025, President Donald Trump issued an executive order banning diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in federal agencies. Various agencies interpreted it as eliminating their in-agency observance planning for Juneteenth and other cultural events. In December 2025, free entry to national parks on Juneteenth was ended. It was replaced with free entry on Flag Day, an unofficial holiday falling on the 14th of June.

• 7. The Juneteenth Flag

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  Ben Haith created the Juneteenth flag in 1997. Illustrator Lisa Jeanne Graf later refined the design. In 2000, Haith hoisted the flag for the first time at Roxbury Heritage State Park in Boston.

  The flag's colors are red, white, and blue, connecting it directly to the American flag. The design carries a specific message: that African Americans and their enslaved ancestors are Americans. They are entitled to the national belief in liberty and justice for all. At the center is a star representing Texas and the extension of freedom for all African Americans across the nation. A burst of light surrounding the star represents a nova. The red curve at the base of the flag represents a horizon, standing for a new era for African Americans.

  By 2006, at least 200 cities across the United States were formally marking the holiday. South Dakota became the last state to formally recognize Juneteenth as an annual holiday, doing so in February 2022.