The story behind Juneteenth and how it became a federal holiday
LA TimesPeople hold a sign about Juneteenth during a parade in Inglewood in 2021, the year it was made a federal holiday. The U.S. government was slow to embrace the occasion — it was only in 2021 that President Biden signed a bill passed by Congress to set aside Juneteenth, or June 19th, as a federal holiday. It’s a portmanteau blending the words “June” and “nineteenth.” The holiday has also been called Juneteenth Independence Day, Freedom Day, second Independence Day and Emancipation Day. The national reckoning over race ignited by the 2020 murder of George Floyd by police helped set the stage for Juneteenth to become the first new federal holiday since 1983, when Martin Luther King Jr. Day was created. “In 1776 the country was freed from the British, but the people were not all free,” Dee Evans, national director of communications of the National Juneteenth Observance Foundation, said in 2019.