The summer calendar has a new national holiday this year. A celebration born and bred in Texas, it is one that not everyone is familiar with given that it was only signed into law last year by President Joe Biden.
To understand Juneteenth, one must visit Galveston, its birthplace.
It was in Galveston that, in June 1865, General Gordon Granger of the Union Army arrived with a force of more than 2,000 troops, many of them Black. From his headquarters at what is now the corner of 22nd Street and Strand Street, he informed the people of Texas of Executive Order No. 3, which declared that all enslaved people in the Lone Star State, approximately 250,000, were now free.
