Days Until Juneteenth

About Juneteenth

June 19 commemorates June 19, 1865, when Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas and announced that enslaved people there were free — over two years after the Emancipation Proclamation had legally freed enslaved people in Confederate states, since enforcement in Texas had lagged.

Long observed within African American communities, particularly in Texas, Juneteenth became a federal holiday in the United States in 2021.

The holiday's name is itself a blend of "June" and "nineteenth," and its 2021 federal recognition made it the first new federal holiday established in the US since Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 1983.

Texas was the first state to make Juneteenth an official state holiday, doing so in 1980, more than four decades before its 2021 federal recognition.

Galveston's role as the specific site of the 1865 announcement is memorialized locally with an annual celebration considered among the oldest continuously observed Juneteenth commemorations in the country.