A celebration that has persisted for over a century receives its first official recognition on June 7, 1979, as Texas Governor William P. Clements Jr. signs a bill declaring Juneteenth a state holiday. Texas becomes the first state in the United States to do so.
The annual June 19 celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation—not the announcement itself but the arrival of the news of the proclamation in Texas—is now a federal holiday. Today, all 50 states either designate Juneteenth as a state holiday or observance. Parades and public celebrations attract larger and larger crowds.
President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation officially freed enslaved people in rebellious Southern states on New Year’s Day of 1863, but the order only applied to territories currently held by the Confederacy. Southerners did not recognize Lincoln’s authority, and in many cases, enslavers and white people simply withheld the news from enslaved people.
The wait was especially long in Texas, where official word of slavery’s demise did not arrive until two months after Robert E. Lee’s surrender in Virginia effectively ended the Civil War. On June 19, 1865, Union Major General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, to declare slavery’s end and grant liberation for enslaved people there at last.
