Brought to the Americas in chains, were people stolen from their land, torn from the arms of loved ones and separated from their identities. This torment would last from 1619 to 1865. During this time, they suffered under heinous acts of violence, inconceivably brutal conditions, and psychological torture and manipulation that would last centuries. 

As their oppressors attempted to break their mind, body and spirit, what could not be taken from them was the ethos of Africa. Even while their bodies ached and bones grew tired, they set their gaze forward and they refused to die. As they continuously made something out of the nothing they were given, they would create a new world. Their hands turned their sweat and their blood into the soil as they laid the foundations of what would become America; each brick stacked on top of Black bodies, ingenuity, history and culture. 

Finally, on January 1, 1863  President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, officially abolishing slavery in Confederate states. Yet, word had not reached enslaved African-Americans in Texas until June 19, 1865 when Union General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas. There, he issued General Order No. 3, announcing the emancipation of enslaved African Americans in Texas. Juneteenth, as it came to be known, commemorates this day and is celebrated as the end of slavery in the United States. Commonly known as Freedom Day.