US Cities Across the Country Offer Juneteenth Sites and Celebrations

On June 17 of last year, President Biden signed legislation making Juneteenth, June 19, a federal holiday.

The signing followed George Floyd's May 2020 murder and an often-painful national focus on issues surrounding race in America. It was during this time that Juneteenth earned an unprecedented recent focus.

Yet many Americans are unaware of the events the holiday commemorates and it's of incalculable significance to Black Americans.

Fortunately, there are many ways to learn more about Juneteenth and its central place in U.S. history through travel to sites from the East Coast and to Western states.

President Abraham Lincoln's 1862 Emancipation Proclamation declared that as of January 1, 1863 "all persons held as slaves" in Confederate states during the U.S. Civil War "are and henceforward shall be free."

But the executive order went largely unenforced in Southern states. Geographically isolated from Union military forces, Texas became a refuge for slaveholders who circumvented the order and concealed the war's end and the Emancipation Proclamation from 250,000 enslaved people.

As war raged, Union troops did not enforce the Proclamation in many southern states until January of 1863. A full two years later, the last battle ended with General Edmund Kirby's defeat in Galveston, Texas on June 2, 1865. Kirby's surrender came eight weeks after Robert E. Lee's at Appomattox, Va.