June 19. Freedom Day. Jubilee Day. Cel-Liberation Day. It commemorates the end of slavery when on June 19, 1865, Union general Gordon Granger finally made it to Galveston, Texas to read federal orders from 1861 announcing that all previously enslaved people were free.
It is the oldest nationally celebrated commemoration of the ending of slavery in the United States. Yes, this was two and a half years after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation that became official on Jan.