A national celebration of the end of slavery that has its Oregon roots in a shipyard in the 1940s will be a state holiday for the first time this year.
For more than 150 years, African-American communities have celebrated June 19, or Juneteenth, the anniversary of the day in 1865 that Union troops finally arrived in Galveston Bay, Texas, and announced that the more than 250,000 enslaved people in the state – the last slaves in the newly reunited U.S. – were free.
Celebrations began in Texas the following year and migrated out. The tradition arrived in Oregon in 1945, when Clara Peoples moved from Muskogee, Oklahoma, to work at the Kaiser shipyards in Portland and introduced it to her colleagues…