Hi, I'm Dan Fromack, and welcome to Axios Recap, where we dig into one big story.

Today is Friday, June 18th.

Average gas prices are up over $3.

U.S. COVID deaths keep going down, and we're focused on the economic state of Black America.

Tomorrow was Juneteenth, a commemoration of the day in 1865 that enslaved Americans in Texas

were emancipated.

It was over two years after President Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation,

but it's when freedom finally became real for many people in Texas, which was then a

Confederate stronghold.

Earlier this week, the U.S. Senate voted by unanimous consent to declare Juneteenth a federal

holiday, and just yesterday, President Biden signed it into law.

American slavery, of course, is in the past, but its legacy remains with us today,

and maybe nowhere is that more evident than the enduring

wealth gap between black and white Americans. For example, the Washington Post reports that

white households in 2016 had $149,000 in median household wealth. The number for black households

was just $13,000. Remember, in America, money begets money,

which means black Americans were disadvantaged from the start

because their labor was unpaid,

and even after emancipation,

black Americans were often blocked from accumulating property and wealth

and from other economic opportunities.

Those disadvantages were perpetuated

...