Why Juneteenth matters: the day slavery truly ended in the U.S.

Americans are getting ready to celebrate Juneteenth, marking the day in 1865 when the last enslaved people in the United States learned they were free, in Galveston, Texas.

Although President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves in 1863, it could not be enforced in many places in the South until the Civil War ended in 1865.

News that the war had ended and that they were finally free reached Galveston when a…