Tyeastia Green Shortly after moving to Burlington last year for a job in city government, Tyeastia Green pitched her new colleagues on celebrating Juneteenth. Green, the Queen City's first director of racial equity, inclusion and belonging, had fond memories of the holiday from growing up in Minneapolis. Yet Green, who was then the city's only Black department head, says she was met with confused looks when she first mentioned the event. It's a portmanteau of June 19, the day in 1865 when enslaved African Americans in Galveston, Texas, learned that they were free, more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed.