00:00The last remaining copy of General Order No. 3, carried by Union troops when they arrived in Galveston, Texas on June 19, 1865, at the end of the American Civil War.
00:13Announcing the news that all enslaved people were now free, the order marks the origin of the Juneteenth celebration.
00:20Juneteenth has become a sort of symbol of the end of slavery. Tradition holds that it was in the summer of 1865 that enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, a lot of them were dock workers, heard about emancipation.
00:39And there was this big announcement that emancipation had come and that freedom was now available to enslaved people.
00:47In the years following the Civil War, marking the occasion was an act of bravery and defiance for many black Americans, particularly those living in the segregated South, where President Lincoln's 1863 Emancipation Act was still widely rejected.
01:05In the late 1800s, celebrations of Juneteenth mainly took place in African-American communities.
01:11This would have been the safest context in which to celebrate emancipation, because as segregation became more entrenched, it's becoming dangerous to really talk about these ideas.
01:23There's a lot of vigilante violence in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
01:28So for African-Americans to even talk about or celebrate emancipation was something that could be potentially inflammatory.
01:36Over the decades, Juneteenth has also been called Freedom Day, Emancipation Day and Second Independence Day.
01:44In 2021, President Biden designated Juneteenth a federal holiday.
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