Juneteenth National Independence Day was launched to celebrate the end of slavery in the U.S.—but not all citizens will enjoy a day off to mark the occasion.
America’s newest federal holiday, named after a contraction of the date “June Nineteenth,” commemorates the events of June 19 in 1865. On that day, some 250,000 still-enslaved African Americans were told that the Civil War had ended and that they had been declared free by law.
The day has been marked ever since in Galveston, Texas, where Union soldiers arrived to free the remaining slaves, and Texas made Juneteenth an official state holiday in 1980. Other parts of the U.S. also began marking the occasion, and just days before the 2021 celebration, on June 16, Congress made June 19 a federal holiday. President Joe Biden signed the holiday into law on June 17.
But Americans will have different experiences of the occasion depending on where they live and whether their bosses will give them the day off.
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