Former president Joe Biden will be attending a Juneteenth celebration at a historic African Methodist Episcopal church in Galveston.
The ex-president’s plans were confirmed by a person with knowledge of them but not authorized to discuss logistics publicly.
In 2021, Biden, a democrat, signed legislation that established Juneteenth as a federal holiday. The day marks the end of slavery by commemorating June 19, 1865, when Union soldiers brought the news of freedom to enslaved Black people in Galveston.
The event Thursday will be held at the Reedy Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Galveston.
That church, the first and oldest operating AME church in the state, is one of the locations where an order announcing the end of slavery in Texas was announced on that day in 1865, according to the Galveston County Daily News.
Juneteenth origins
Juneteenth — a portmanteau of “June” and “nineteenth” — commemorates the day many enslaved people in Texas learned they had been freed. On June 19, 1865, General Gordon Granger stood at Galveston Bay with General Order No. 3, the document pronouncing all enslaved African-Americans living in Texas were free. The only known original copy of the order is part of the permanent archives of the Dallas Historical Society housed at The Hall of State in Fair Park.
President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863, announcing that enslaved people “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free,” but the proclamation didn’t immediately apply in certain areas, including secessionist states like Texas, which had left the Union and joined the Confederacy during the Civil War.
It took another two years for the news to be enacted in Texas. The Civil War ended in April 1865 and Granger showed up in Galveston two months later and declared, “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.”
Slavery was formally abolished after Congress ratified the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution nearly six months later, on Dec. 6, 1865. Freed enslaved people marked June 19 the following year, kicking off the first celebration of Juneteenth.
Juneteenth is also known as Black Independence Day, Emancipation Day, Freedom Day, Juneteenth Independence Day or Juneteenth National Freedom Day. Juneteenth was officially designated as a federal holiday, known as Juneteenth National Independence Day. The effort for federal recognition took more than four decades and was accomplished in no small part due to the effort of Fort Worth’s own Opal Lee. Known affectionately as “The Grandmother of Juneteenth,” Lee made national recognition of the state holiday her life’s work.
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