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HAPPY JUNETEENTH INDEPENDENCE DAY!

TODAY, JUNE 19TH, 2020 IS A DAY OF CELEBRATION FOR ALL AMERICA. “Juneteenth” as it has been known since its beginning is a holiday that honors the end of slavery in the United States. For the past 155 years, It has been celebrated yearly by Black Americans and largely ignored by non-black Americans. For most of us non-blacks, our schooling focused on crediting President Abraham Lincoln with freeing slaves by signing the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862 and bringing the Civil War to a close. Yet it would actually be two more years before slavery was officially ended. Gen. Gordon Granger and a group of Union troops arrived in Galveston, TX to inform slaves of their freedom on June 19th, 1865. “Juneteenth”, is a blend word, combining “June” and “nineteenth” into one word. The holiday is known as “Freedom Day” or “Juneteenth Independence Day”, or just “Juneteenth”.

Junteenth should, in fact, be a National Holiday for ALL Americans to celebrate. Slavery was wrong. Much of our prosperity as a nation was built upon the misery of a people stolen from their homes, treated as property, and eventually emancipated, only to be reviled by their former captors. America’s soul, as great as it is, was and still is, weakened by not recognizing how important General Granger’s arrival to Galveston was. His determination to declare freedom to those still being enslaved two years after they had been freed was a great moment. Juneteenth is a day America became a better nation. It was a day of reckoning and should still be. We continue to have a long way to go, but on this Juneteenth Independence Day, let us take another honest look at ourselves and commit to an even brighter future for all our precious American People.

HAPPY JUNETEENTH AMERICA!!

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