Caribbean-American legislators in New York on Thursday, June 19, joined the nation in celebrating Juneteenth, commemorating “a pivotal moment” in American history.
Juneteenth, observed each year on June 19, marks the day in 1865 when Union troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, and announced the end of slavery, freeing the last enslaved African Americans in the former Confederate states.
“Though emancipation came in 1865, freedom is still too often delayed for too many in our communities today,” Brooklyn Democratic Party Chair Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn, a New York state assembly member and the daughter of Haitian immigrants, told Caribbean Life…