Juneteenth Countdown 2027

Juneteenth falls on 19 June, and has been a US federal holiday since 2021 — the first new one created since Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 1983.

What the date marks. On 19 June 1865, Major General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, and issued General Order No. 3, announcing that all enslaved people in the state were free. The Emancipation Proclamation had taken effect two and a half years earlier, on 1 January 1863, but it could only be enforced where Union forces were present — and Texas, the most remote Confederate state, had remained beyond their reach.

Not the end of slavery in the United States. Emancipation became universal only with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865. Juneteenth marks the moment the news reached the last major holdout, not the legal abolition itself.

The name is a contraction of June and nineteenth. The day has been celebrated in Texas since 1866, spread with the Great Migration, and was made a Texas state holiday in 1980 — the first state to do so.

Red is the colour of the table: red drinks and red food — strawberry soda, red velvet cake, watermelon — are traditional, an association usually traced to West African symbolism carried through slavery.

All fifty states now recognise the day in some form, though it is a paid holiday for state employees in only a portion of them.