Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the MO News podcast. I'm Moshe Wenunu. Today, we bring you a special holiday edition of the podcast, what we'd like to call the MO You Know, where we take a deeper dive into one topic.

Today's focus, a closer look at the history and origins of Juneteenth Day. It includes the story of Opal Lee, who is now 96 years old and walked for hundreds of miles to make Juneteenth Day a federal holiday.

While it was celebrated locally for decades, it's not become a federal holiday until just 2021. It's seen as a second Independence Day of sorts for many Americans who did not get their freedom with the country at its founding.

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Again, you can do that over at mo.news slash premium. With that said, here's today's episode.

It is a significant day in American history that has gone under the radar for a major part of the country for decades.

Juneteenth, short for June 19th, marks the day in 1865 when federal union troops arrived in Galveston, Texas to announce that all enslaved people were to be immediately freed.

What many people don't know is that that 1865 announcement actually came a full two and a half years after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

We all remember the Emancipation Proclamation as the document that declared all enslaved people in Confederate states and rebellion against the union shall be, quote, forever free.

President Lincoln signed the document back on January 1st, 1863, and yet Black Americans were still in bondage more than two and a half years later in places like Galveston, Texas.

So what happened? In reality, the Emancipation Proclamation didn't instantly free all enslaved people in 1863.

The Proclamation only applied to places under official Confederate control and not to rebel areas already under union control or slave holding border states.

Remember, Texas had been its own independent country just decades earlier and always prided itself on independence.

As of 1863, Texas had not been defeated yet in the Civil War and white people in the state felt that slavery was key to the future of their economy.

So through all of 1863, 1864, and through the summer of 1865, slavery continued in territories and states like Texas where there was no large-scale fighting or significant presence of union troops.

Many in slavers from other Confederate states like Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana had also moved there, viewing it as a safe haven for slavery.

There was no union army presence there and therefore they could continue the practice.

So the Civil War then comes to a close in the spring of 1865, General Robert E. Lee and the Confederate military surrender in April.

The final battle is fought in May as it takes weeks for word to travel around the country that the war is actually over.

The next month, in June 1865, Major General Gordon Granger arrives at Galveston Island, Texas.

He has the mission to inform all of Texas's 250,000 enslaved people that they were free.

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