Juneteenth National Independence Day, or Juneteenth, is one of 12 United States federal holidays. The name joins June with nineteenth, for June 19, 1865. Congress created it through Public Law 117-17, signed by President Biden on June 17, 2021.
It is the first new federal holiday since Martin Luther King Jr. Day, created in 1983. The U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) administers it for the federal workforce, and USA.gov lists it in its American holidays guide. It commemorates Union Major General Gordon Granger's General Order No. 3 of June 19, 1865, issued in Galveston, Texas.
The order announced that the Emancipation Proclamation, the January 1, 1863 order freeing enslaved people in the Confederate states, was in effect there. It is not an economic indicator, so nothing is surveyed, sampled, weighted, or adjusted. It is not a nationwide closure order, and it is not Independence Day on July 4.