Juneteenth: How the US holiday is being celebrated

On 19 June 1865 - months after the northern US states defeated the slave-owning South in the US Civil War - enslaved African-Americans in Galveston, Texas, were finally told they were free.
That act of liberation came more than two and a half years after President Abraham Lincoln declared all enslaved people in the rebellious states to be free by issuing the Emancipation Proclamation.