... since 1980, and has been celebrated here by the Black community since 1866. The rest of the country is coming late to the party.
Probably no one outside of Texas (who isn't black) had ever heard of it until recently, and I'm not quite sure why that is. The myth is that the Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves. In reality, it only declared the slaves in the Confederacy to be free (there were still slaves in the Northern states); it was ignored by the Confederacy and couldn't be enforced.
June 19, 1865, is the day the people of the last of the defeated Confederate states were officially told that slavery would no longer be allowed. Some slaveholders simply refused to comply, others wanted to hold onto their slaves for just one more harvest, so slavery continued in some form for several more years until the 14th Amendment was ratified, but June 19 is considered the day of emancipation. |
