Most Americans think Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation set the slaves free. It is more complicated than that. The proclamation actually said that all slaves in Confederate controlled territory would be free as of Jan. 1, 1863. The only problem was the Union obviously did not have control of those areas and since the slaveowners were not going to respect an order from Lincoln, not a single slave was freed. In fact, the Proclamation did not apply to slaves in areas that the Union army had occupied! (Lincoln did not want to offend the border states.) Texas had seen little fighting and a vast amount of its 250,000 slaves were in Confederate hands. In fact, some slaveholders in other parts of the South had relocated to Texas with their slaves. Few of the slaves in Texas were aware of the proclamation. And their owners kept it that way. This situation continued even after Lee’s surrender to Grant in April, 1865. On June 19, 1865, a Union army under Gen. Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston Bay and he issued a statement: “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the U.S., all slaves are free.” The word spread quickly and now the owners could no longer continue the charade. Freed slaves began to celebrate June 19 as Jubilee Day. It became better known as Juneteenth and was made a state holiday in 1977. The rest of the nation was made more aware of the date after police shootings of African-Americans like George Floyd. On June 17, 2021, President Biden made June 19 a federal holiday.
https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/historical-legacy-juneteenth
https://www.history.com/news/what-is-juneteenth
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