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Honoring and recognizing the national holiday Juneteenth 2025 as an annual celebration of Black Liberation in the City of Saint Paul.
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WHEREAS Juneteenth, also known as Emancipation Day, Freedom Day, or Juneteenth Independence Day, commemorates the emancipation of American descendants of chattel slavery in the United States; and
WHEREAS the news that slavery had officially ended and that the enslaved were free throughout the land now known as the United States was neither announced nor enforced in the western former Confederate states such as Mississippi, Louisiana, and in particular Texas until two and a half years after the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation due to a low presence of the Union Army in those areas; and
WHEREAS on June 19, 1865, Union General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, historically known to be where the remaining American descendants of chattel slavery were and announced the end of the Civil War and the emancipation of all enslaved people, over two years after President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation; and
WHEREAS Union General William T. Sherman’s planned to give American descendants of chattel slavery “forty acres and a mule” was among the first and most significant promises made - and broken - to African Americans. As the Union army gradually took over Confederate territory, there was a question as to what freedom really meant for the emancipated. Without property, money, or an education, most did not have a clear or immediate path toward economic independence; and
WHEREAS after the abolishment of slavery, American descendants of chattel slavery experienced extreme disparities through Jim Crow laws, sharecropping, lynching, redlining, segregation, mass incarceration, forced segregation, mass atrocities in Tulsa and Rosewood, and many other forms of systemic oppression that impact Black Americans today; and
WHEREAS since 2021, the United States Congress and President Joe Biden took formal action to...
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