In 2021. President Joe Biden made Juneteenth [6/19] a national holiday. After 2 1/2 years of suffrage, enslaved people of Galveston, TX. were notified that they were free because President Lincoln signed the emancipation in 1863.
That banner with a bursting star in the middle is the Juneteenth Flag, a symbolic representation of the end of slavery in the United States. See symbols definition.The flag is the brainchild of activist Ben Haith, founder of the National Juneteenth Celebration Foundation (NJCF).
Juneteenth (short for “June Nineteenth”) marks the day when federal troops arrived in Galveston, Texas in 1865 to take control of the state and ensure that all enslaved people be freed. The troops’ arrival came a full two and a half years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation.
Confederate General Robert E. Lee had surrendered at Appomattox Court House two months earlier in Virginia, but slavery had remained relatively unaffected in Texas—until U.S. General Gordon Granger stood on Texas soil and read General Orders No. 3: “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.”
In the United States before 1865, a slave state was a state in which the slave trade was legal, while a free state was one in which it was not. There were enslaved persons in most free states in the 1840 census, and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 specifically stated that an enslaved person remained enslaved even if their owner took them to a free state.
Historically, in the 18th century, slavery existed in all the British colonies of North America, including the Thirteen Colonies. Pennsylvania abolished slavery in 1780, and about half the states abolished slavery during the Revolutionary War or in the first decades of the new country. Slavery became a very divisive issue and was a major issue during the writing of the U.S. Constitution, and slavery was the primary cause of the American Civil War. Before the Civil War, there were 19 free states and 15 slave states. During the war, slavery was abolished on some of these jurisdictions, and the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in December of 1865, finally abolished slavery throughout the United States.
In the District of Columbia, formed with land from two slave states, Maryland and Virginia, the trade was abolished by the Compromise of 1850. So as to avoid losing the profitable slave trading businesses in Alexandria (one was Franklin and Armfield), Alexandria County, D.C., requested that it be returned to Virginia, where the slave trade was legal; this took place in 1847. Slavery in the District of Columbia remained legal until 1862 when the walkout of all the Southern legislators permitted those remaining to pass the ban, which abolitionists had been seeking for decades.
Race Massacre
The Tulsa race massacre took place on May 31 and June 1, 1921, when mobs of white residents attacked black residents and businesses of the Greenwood District [Black Wallstreet] in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It has been called “the single worst incident of racial violence in American history.”
Juneteenth is a day to discuss, amplify, and exhibit how to make our society more racially just!
A National Holiday!
