It was 160 years ago that enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, learned they had been freed — after the Civil War’s end and two years after President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.
The resulting Juneteenth holiday — its name combining “June” and “nineteenth” — has only grown in one-and-a-half centuries. In 2021, President Joe Biden designated it a federal holiday — expanding its recognition beyond Black America.