Juneteenth is June 19th, 2020.

It is the oldest known celebration honoring the end of slavery in the United States. On June 19, 1865, two months after the surrender of Confederate General Robert E. Lee at Appomattox Court House in Virginia, Union General Gordon Granger led thousands of federal troops to Galveston, Texas to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation and announce that the Civil War had ended, and the enslaved had been freed.

Granger read General Orders No. 3, which declared in part: “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all enslaved are free.” Juneteenth (short for “June Nineteenth”) is a holiday commemorating this day, which marked the effective end of slavery in the United States.

More than two years before Granger’s announcement, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation (on January 1, 1863), which made known that all enslaved people in Confederate states in rebellion against the Union “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.”

In reality, the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t instantly free any enslaved because it only applied to places under Confederate control and not to slave-holding border states or rebel areas already under Union control. However, as Northern troops advanced into the Confederate South, many slaves fled behind Union lines. There were many forces that used various methods to prevent enslaved people from knowing they were freed.