In Texas where I grew up there were festive parades and picnics in Black communities every June It wasn rsquo t until I was a teenager that I learned the heartbreaking significance of Juneteenth a word combining ldquo June rdquo and ldquo nineteenth rdquo celebrations Juneteenth commemorates the day in when enslaved people in Texas learned that President Abraham Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation giving them their freedom mdash two-and-a-half years earlier Enslaved people in Texas kept living in slavery because they didn rsquo t know they had been freed It's possible to be free and yet live as
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