Juneteenth—which commemorates when, two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation, formerly enslaved people on the Gulf Coast of Texas learned that they were free—became the United States’ 12th federal holiday.1 Opal Lee, whose family home in Fort Worth, Texas, was burned to the ground by a white-supremacist mob exactly 82 years before, was given the pen the president used to sign the bill into law; celebrations took place across the United States as well as in Nacimiento, Mexico, where hundreds of slaves escaped via the Southern Underground Railroad; and the Ford Motor Company—whose founder pressured dealerships to carry copies of the
Weekly Review
Weekly Review
Weekly Review
Juneteenth—which commemorates when, two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation, formerly enslaved people on the Gulf Coast of Texas learned that they were free—became the United States’ 12th federal holiday.1 Opal Lee, whose family home in Fort Worth, Texas, was burned to the ground by a white-supremacist mob exactly 82 years before, was given the pen the president used to sign the bill into law; celebrations took place across the United States as well as in Nacimiento, Mexico, where hundreds of slaves escaped via the Southern Underground Railroad; and the Ford Motor Company—whose founder pressured dealerships to carry copies of the