June 19, 2020 | 10:52am | Updated June 19, 2020 | 12:34pm
Juneteenth will be an official holiday in New York City beginning next year, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Friday.
“Starting next year, Juneteenth will be an official holiday and an official New York City schools holiday,” the mayor said at his daily press briefing.
Juneteenth is a day commemorating the official end of slavery.
“It’s a celebration of a liberation that never really came. The fact is it’s also a day of reckoning,” Hizzoner continued. “Four hundred years of American history tell us one simple thing … for 400 years, one group of Americans has been treated profoundly unequal.”
Many states, including New York, have made Juneteenth, which falls on June 19 each year, an official holiday.
The Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves in 1863, but it wasn’t fully enforced until after the end of the Civil War two years later.
On June 19, 1865, Union troops led by Gen. Gordon Granger rode into Galveston, Texas, to deliver the news to slaves there that the Confederates had lost the war — and they were free.
