Enshrined as a Pennsylvania state holiday since 2019 and a federal one two years later, Juneteenth is a commemoration of June 19, 1865, the date when the Emancipation Agreement was enforced in Texas — more than two years after it was signed — granting freedom to the state’s remaining slaves.

It was 160 years ago that enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, learned they had been freed — after Civil War's end and two years after President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation