There are a number of activities on the West Side being held Friday to celebrate Juneteenth, the oldest nationally celebrated commemoration of the ending of slavery in the United States.
It commemorates June 19, 1865, when Union general Gordon Granger read federal orders in Galveston, Texas, that all previously enslaved people in Texas were free. Although the Emancipation Proclamation had formally freed them almost two and a half years earlier, and the Civil War had largely ended with the defeat of the Confederate states in April, Texas was the most remote of the slave states, with a low presence of Union troops, so enforcement of the proclamation had been slow and inconsistent.
