Galveston was home to the first Juneteenth. Here's how it'll celebrate this year

June 19th commemorates the fall of slavery in Galveston in 1865 — two years after the Emancipation Proclamation ordered the liberation of Black people held in the Confederacy.

“I have newspaper records of my great-grandfather — who was by this time, in 1885, he would have been 25 years old — and he was given the role of reading the Emancipation Proclamation at that celebration,” said 67-year-old Roy Collins.