On June 19, 1865, Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas and announced that all enslaved people were free — two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation had legally freed them.

The news spread through Texas and then across the South. People celebrated. They called it Juneteenth.

For generations, the celebration was kept alive primarily by Black women: church mothers who organized community feasts, mothers who told their children what the date meant, community organizers who refused to let the commemoration disappear when it received no official recognition and no public resources.

Opal Lee, a civil rights activist from Fort Worth, began her campaign to make Juneteenth a national holiday in 1939, when she was ten years old and a white mob attacked her family's home for moving into a white neighborhood on June 19th. She never stopped.

She walked two and a half miles every year on Juneteenth — symbolizing the two and a half years between emancipation and the Texas announcement. She was 89 years old when Juneteenth was declared a federal holiday in 2021.

The ceremony's continuity across those 156 years rested heavily on women who organized and remembered when institutions forgot.