Juneteenth

When it falls

19 June every year, a federal holiday in the United States since 2021 and a state holiday in Texas since 1980.

The Phala almanac gives the exact day for your own city; the lunar and solar rules above are what it computes from.

The story

Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation took effect on 1 January 1863, but it could only be enforced where the Union army was. Texas, the farthest state of the Confederacy, was reached last: on 19 June 1865 General Gordon Granger read General Order No. 3 at Galveston, that all slaves are free, to a state where a quarter of a million people were still enslaved. The freed people of Texas kept the anniversary from the next year, and carried it across the country in the migrations of the twentieth century.

The name is the month and the day run together. It was made a federal holiday in June 2021, the first new one since Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 1983.

How the day is kept

• Readings of the Emancipation Proclamation and General Order No. 3; church services and the singing of Lift Every Voice and Sing.
• Parades and festivals in Galveston, Houston, Atlanta, Milwaukee and Philadelphia, with the Juneteenth flag of red, white and blue with a star.
• Cookouts with red food and drink on the table: strawberry soda, red velvet cake, watermelon and barbecue, the colour for the blood of the enslaved and for resilience.
• Rodeos in Texas, and the Miss Juneteenth pageants that go back to the 1920s.

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