Juneteenth Day

Juneteenth is an official holiday in several U.S. states and is growing in popularity both nationally and globally. Juneteenth is the celebration of the end of slavery; the last place to abolish slavery in the United States was Galveston, Texas, on June 19th, 1865, two-and-one-half years after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863. There are several theories why emancipation came so much later to Galveston, and those theories are some of the topics that students will discover as they research the end of slavery in the Western Hemisphere.