A look back at how Juneteenth went viral.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Lily Dramale. Shortly after the Union won the Civil War in 1865, a Union Major General issued an order which began as follows.

The people of Texas are informed that in accordance with a proclamation from

the executive of the United States all slaves are free.

June 19th, known as Juneteenth, has long been celebrated by African Americans,

but in 2020, in the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic

and the uprising that followed the murder of George Floyd.

Juneteenth took the internet by storm.

Brandon Obunu wrote about it Ben for Wired.

He's an assistant professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

at Yale. He revisited what was happening at that time. A year before Juneteenth became a national

holiday. There were a lot of conversations that were happening about kind of who gets to be represented,

who is disproportionately impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic,

and there was an overlap

kind of in the social justice conversations

between kind of the George Floyd protests

and what was happening in terms of health access

and health equity and health disparities in the United States around the pandemic.

So in this moment, I think Juneteenth, which happened in the summer, right?

Kind of just as all the stuff was getting revving up and really getting going,

it became the singular moment for everyone to kind of stop and reflect on kind of what it meant to be in, know in here an American what's you know what

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