Juneteenth

THE US commemorated the end of the legal enslavement of Black Americans yesterday after President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris signed a bill into law this week making June 19 a federal holiday.

On the day in 1865 a Union general informed a group of enslaved people in Texas that they had been freed two years earlier by President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation.

The law comes a year after protests against racism following the killing of George Floyd, an African-American man, by a Minneapolis police officer. |