Juneteenth: the history behind June 19

What happened on June 19, 1865?

Two months after Confederate armies began surrendering, Union Major General Gordon Granger landed in Galveston with federal troops and issued General Order No. 3, which said that all enslaved people in Texas were free. The Emancipation Proclamation had declared freedom in Confederate-held territory on January 1, 1863, but in remote Texas, far from Union armies, enslavers had kept people in bondage. The National Archives holds the handwritten order.

The order told freed people to stay where they were and work for wages, a sign of how limited the freedom being offered was. Many left anyway, in what became known as "the scatter," to look for family members who had been sold away.

How did the celebration spread?

Freed Black Texans began celebrating the anniversary in 1866 with church services, picnics, readings of the proclamation and later parades. Some communities bought land for celebrations, such as Emancipation Park in Houston. As Black Texans moved west and north in the twentieth century, they took Juneteenth with them. Texas made it a state holiday in 1980, and most states recognized it in some form before Congress acted.

How did it become a national holiday?

After nationwide protests over racial justice in 2020, Congress passed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act, and President Joe Biden signed it on June 17, 2021. It was the first new federal holiday since Martin Luther King Jr. Day was established in 1983.

Why does a Fannie Lou Hamer site cover Juneteenth?

Hamer was born only fifty-two years after Juneteenth, into a sharecropping system that kept many freed families in debt and dependence. Her life shows how much of the work of emancipation was still undone a century later. Our companion page, From emancipation to the ballot in Mississippi, traces that history in her home state. The addresses juneteenth.html and juneteenthi.html come from an earlier site on this domain; we kept them so old links work.