When is Juneteenth 2025? What Juneteenth means and how to celebrate explained

Americans will celebrate their next public holiday on Thursday, when 19 June is commemorated as Juneteenth across the US.

The holiday was created after Congress passed a bill on the subject in June 2021, with then President Joe Biden later signing the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act into law.

What is Juneteenth?

A portmanteau of the words ‘June’ and ‘nineteenth’, Juneteenth concerns the moment in 1865 when more than 25,000 enslaved Black people in the state of Texas were told by the Union army that they were free.

That moment happened two and a half years after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared that enslaved people in Confederate states were now legally free.

The National Museum of African American History and Culture notes that it was “only through the Thirteenth Amendment” to the US constitution that “emancipation became national policy”.

The amendment states: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

How is Juneteenth celebrated?

On its webpage providing more information about Juneteenth, the US National Park Service (NPS) stated the holiday “continues to be celebrated in cities with Black populations through a series of parades, family reunions, speeches, and consuming of specific foods with a red colour including barbeque, watermelon (an African fruit), and ‘red soda water’ (primarily strawberry soda).”

The NPS adds that the use of red in ceremonies “is a practice that enslaved West Africans brought to the United States”, while Adrian E Miller, a James Beard Award-winning food writer, states red foods “are preferred because the colour red symbolizes the blood previously shed by enslaved West Africans”.

Why not read...

• How to celebrate Juneteenth in New York City this year
• Brits stunned to learn how many work holidays Americans are entitled to

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