On Saturday, the United States marks Juneteenth for the first time as a federal holiday commemorating the end of the legal enslavement of Black Americans.
President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris on Thursday signed a bill making Juneteenth the eleventh federally recognized holiday, just over a year after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis ignited nationwide protests for racial justice and for ending police brutality.
Juneteenth, or June 19th, marks the day in 1865 when a Union general informed a group of enslaved people in Texas that they had been made free two years earlier by President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation during the Civil War.
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