The 411 on Juneteenth, a Celebration of Freedom from Slavery

Saturday's Juneteenth events - the United States' oldest known celebration of the end of slavery - will take on special meaning  this year. On Wednesday, the U.S. House of Representatives  overwhelmingly joined the U.S. Senate in making Juneteenth a federal holiday.

President Joe Biden today signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act into law, granting every federal employee a day off annually on June 19 to commemorate the day Black slaves learned they had been freed. 

The Birmingham Public Library will celebrate Juneteenth weekend by hosting its nationally-recognized "Read-In for Justice" program on Friday, June 18, beginning at 10:00 a.m. at Learning Tree Park outside the Five Points West Regional Library. The public is invited as area citizens and leaders read works about the issue of race and social justice.  

What is Juneteenth?

Juneteenth stands for June 19, 1865, the day enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, discovered President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation freed enslaved African Americans in rebel states 2½ years earlier. Juneteeth is also known as Freedom Day or Emancipation Day. 

Although Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation went into effect Jan. 1, 1863, his executive order did not free all of the 4 million slaves in the U.S. - only those in states that had surrendered to Union forces. 

The Emancipation Proclamation had no teeth in much of the U.S. as it was signed at the midpoint of the U.S. Civil War. General Gordon Granger and his Union soldiers did not arrive with news that all enslaved people had been freed by executive order until June 1865, two months after President Lincoln had been assassinated.  The American Civil War officially ended on June 2, 1865. 

Slavery was abolished with the passage of the 13th Amendment on January 31, 1865. 

The celebration has even more significance this year as the 2021  Juneteenth comes a few weeks after the 100th anniversary of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, one of the deadliest acts of racial violence in U.S. history.  

The 3rd floor of the Central Library has a Juneteenth display of books & DVDs.

Want to learn more about Juneteenth? Our libraries are here to help. 

For a listing of Birmingham Public Library and Jefferson County Library Cooperative members'  books, DVDs and other library materials about Juneteenth and Emancipation available for checkout, click here 

Click on this link for a report by NBC 13 on Juneteenth events taking place in metro Birmingham.

This year's Juneteenth will feature a series of specials on television, musical performances and concerts across the country as the nation returns to in-person celebrations after pausing a year ago due to the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the biggest is "Junetenth: Together We Triumph – A Soul of a Nation,"  airing Friday night, June 18, on ABC and hosted by Leslie Odom Jr., famous for his role in the Broadway play Hamilton. 

 Click on this link for a listing of Juneteenth specials coming up.