Juneteenth in the United States

Yes. Juneteenth National Independence Day is one of the eleven legal public holidays in 5 U.S.C. § 6103, added in 2021. Federal offices close and federal employees receive the day off with pay.

It is the newest federal holiday and the first added since Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 1983. State-level observance is still uneven: most states recognise it, but not all close state offices.

Juneteenth is fixed to June 19, so it falls on a different weekday each year.

Because the date is fixed rather than tied to a weekday, the federal observed-date rule applies: a Saturday June 19 is observed on Friday June 18, and a Sunday June 19 on Monday June 20.

On June 19, 1865, Major General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, and issued General Order No. 3, informing the people of Texas that all enslaved people were free. This was two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation took effect on January 1, 1863.

Texas was the most remote of the Confederate states and had seen little Union troop presence, so the proclamation had gone largely unenforced there. Slavery was formally abolished nationwide later that year by the Thirteenth Amendment, ratified on December 6, 1865.

Texas made Juneteenth a state holiday in 1980, the first state to do so. Recognition spread state by state over the following four decades.

The Juneteenth National Independence Day Act passed the Senate unanimously and the House 415–14, and President Joe Biden signed it into law on June 17, 2021. The first federal observance followed two days later.