06/19/2026
Juneteenth marks the day freedom finally reached Texas, more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. Until Union troops arrived to enforce it, the 250,000 people enslaved there stayed in bo***ge.
Many of those troops were Black soldiers who had fought for that freedom themselves. Among the first were the 1st and 3rd Louisiana Native Guards, who charged Port Hudson in 1863, one of the first major Civil War battles fought by Black troops.
On June 19, 1865, they reached Galveston, and the enslaved of Texas were finally free.
This Juneteenth, we remember the men who fought for their own freedom.
