Honestly, I didn’t learn about Juneteenth until I was an adult. Like many Americans, I made it through years of school without fully understanding why June 19th holds such deep significance for so many of my Black brothers and sisters.

Juneteenth commemorates June 19, 1865, when Union troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, and announced that enslaved people were free, more than two years after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.