Events

Register to attend: https://nvillelib.org/49BI3Bt

Juneteenth is the newest federal holiday, but it draws on African American traditions dating back to the Civil War. On June 19, 1865, Major General Gordon Granger led Union troops into Galveston, Texas, and ordered the enforcement of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in the trans-Mississippi West, an area that had largely been excluded from the normal progress of Union forces. Blacks in Texas began celebrating Juneteenth the following year. It remained a regional holiday until six million African Americans migrated to the North and West between World War I and 1970, in a movement known as the Great Migration, bringing their traditions with them. Congress made Juneteenth a federal holiday in 2021.