📜 History & Origins
On June 19, 1865 — over two years after the Emancipation Proclamation — Union Major General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas and announced that the more than 250,000 enslaved people in the state were free, among the last in the Confederacy to be told. Freedmen in Texas began celebrating 'Jubilee Day' the following year, and the tradition spread across Black communities nationwide. Juneteenth was recognized as a state holiday in Texas in 1980, and President Joe Biden signed it into law as a federal holiday on June 17, 2021.
