Juneteenth is a key day in the history of all Black Americans and Gwinnett County residents will have a few opportunities to celebrate it both on the day of the holiday and the days surrounding it.
Officially Juneteenth is Thursday. The day marks the anniversary of June 19, 1865, which is the day when the last enslaved Black people learned they had been freed at the end of the Civil War. This year marks the 160th anniversary of that event.
Officially slavery was terminated with the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, but it took a while for the slaves in the Confederate states to hear about it. The last slaves to hear they’d been freed were in Galveston, Texas, and it took two years for the news of the Emancipation Proclamation to reach them…