Today is Juneteenth.
This is the day that our nation commemorates the end of slavery in the U.S. The name of the holiday is a combination of June and 19th. President Abraham Lincoln freed enslaved African Americans when he issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1st, 1863 and it became law later that year through the 13th Amendment. But slavery didn’t effectively end until June 19th, 1865 when Major General Gorden Granger and his two-thousand Union troops arrived in Galveston Bay, Texas and proclaimed that more than 250-thousand enslaved Black people in Texas were free.
Here in our state, the Juneteenth flag is once again flying over the Wisconsin Capitol.
Governor Tony Evers signed an executive order yesterday to fly the flag in honor of Juneteenth, the day that America uses to mark the end of slavery. Evers has flown the flag over the Capitol each year since 2020. The flag will come down at the end of the day today.
