Find out more about our newest National Holiday from the National League!

"Juneteenth is the oldest nationally celebrated commemoration of the ending of slavery in the United States, and just one of several “Emancipation Days” observed by Black diasporic communities in the Caribbean, Mexico, Canada, and the U.S.

The holiday is celebrated on June 19th (thus the name, Juneteenth) because, on that date in 1865, Union soldiers announced to enslaved persons in Texas that the U.S. Civil War had ended and that they had been freed from bondage by the Emancipation Proclamation (two years prior in 1863). Freed Black and Afro-Indigenous people from Texas brought the celebration with them when they migrated to nearby places like Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Mexico and—even farther—to California, Oregon, and Washington state."

Read more at: https://www.lwv.org/blog/juneteenth-celebration-emancipation-and-black-liberation