40-year march: Only one state doesn’t recognize Juneteenth
| Forty years after the first state recognized the formal end of slavery in the United States as cause for an official celebration, President Biden signed legislation Thursday making Juneteenth a national holiday.
The march from unofficial holiday to a formal day off for most federal employees started in Texas, more than a century after Union General Gordon Granger issued an 1865 order freeing the remaining 250,000 or so Black people who were still enslaved in the state, two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. It took until 1979 for Texas to formally recognize the holiday, after legislators approved a measure introduced by state Rep. Al Edwards (D), a veteran civil rights activist who marched with Martin Luther King Jr. Edwards introduced the bill in the first of his thirteen terms in office. |
