The Black Freedom Struggle Continues This year, our 55th, and henceforth, the Center for Constitutional Rights will formally observe Juneteenth as a paid holiday for all staff. Long celebrated in many Black communities, the first Juneteenth immortalized June 19, 1865, the day on which the last enslaved Africans in Galveston, Texas, were formally emancipated, more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. Officially, emancipation would not be fully realized until December 18 of the same year with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment and the release of enslaved people from...