Juneteenth has only just been recognized as a federal holiday to commemorate the end of slavery in America, but Eleanor Thompson has decades of memories celebrating it in Austin.
“It was a big event all over town,” Thompson, 78, recalls. “It was our holiday.”
Juneteenth honors 19 June 1865, the day when the last enslaved African Americans were freed in Galveston, Texas. Though the Emancipation Proclamation was signed by Abraham Lincoln in 1863, it was not enforced in Galveston until federal soldiers arrived to read it out after the end of the civil war.
Up until last year, Texas was the only state to recognize Juneteenth as a state holiday, giving most
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