On June 17, about a fortnight before July 4 when America celebrates its Independence Day, Biden signed a law memorializing June 19 and declaring it a federal holiday. The Act commemorates June 19, 1865, when Union General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, and informed enslaved African Americans that the Civil War had ended and they were free. Granger s message came more than two years after President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation which points to the terrible injustice of keeping a group of enslaved Americans in chains in contravention of Lincolnâs order for their emancipation.
When signing it, an emotional Biden noted in a somewhat hyperbolic vein, This is a day, in my view, of profound weight and profound power, a day in which we remember the moral stain, terrible toll that slavery took on the country and continues to take. Vice President Kamala Harris chimed in claiming that designating June 19th a federal holiday makes an important statement. Th