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 US 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.

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