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Juneteenth is now an official holiday at GMSR. We will commemorate Juneteenth this year by closing our office on Friday, June 18.

One hundred fifty-six years ago, the Emancipation Proclamation – which had been issued by President Lincoln two and a half years earlier – finally reached the last remaining slaves in Texas. The day after Union troops arrived in Galveston, freedmen in Texas organized the first annual celebration of “Jubilee Day” on June 19. Now known as Juneteenth, it is the country’s oldest celebration of the end of slavery.

We commemorate Juneteenth not as an endpoint, but as the beginning of a chapter that this country still struggles to write – one where the country lives up to its fundamental promises of equality, liberty, and freedom for all.