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Tomorrow, on June 19, we will celebrate what is now known as Juneteenth National Independence Day, a milestone in America’s continual journey to reckon with its original sin of slavery. On this day 156 years ago, Major General Gordon Granger marched into Galveston, Texas, and informed more than 200,000 enslaved Black Americans that they were finally free — more than two years after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Since then, June 19 has been recognized as Juneteenth as a celebration of the de facto end of the brutal institution of slavery in the United States.
