Juneteenth is officially a state holiday in Colorado

DENVER — Members of the Black Democratic Legislative Caucus of Colorado joined Governor Jared Polis Wednesday on the steps of the Colorado State Capitol to highlight a new bill that would make Juneteenth Colorado’s eleventh state holiday.

“This is a critical part of our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion and movement to increase equality in state agencies,” said Colorado WINS president Skip Miller, who spoke at the event. Colorado WINS is the union representing thousands of state workers.

Colorado Sen. Janet Buckner (D-Aurora), Sen. James Coleman (D-Denver) and Rep. Leslie Herod (D-Denver) are the bill’s sponsors.

“Making Juneteenth a state holiday means Colorado not only recognizes that Black people are free, but that all people are free,” Coleman said at the Capitol.

You can read the full text of SB22-139 here. The bill’s sponsors brought it to the Senate floor Feb. 24. It was assigned to the State, Veterans, & Military Affairs Committee, where it will be considered in a March 15 meeting.

Juneteenth — a portmanteau of the words June and nineteenth, the date on which the holiday takes place — is a celebration that started with the freed slaves of Galveston, Texas more than 150 years ago. Though the Emancipation Proclamation freed enslaved people in the South in 1863, the proclamation was not enforced in many places in the South, including Texas, until after the Civil War ended in 1865. Until then, many enslaved people were unaware of what happened in the Civil War or the fact that they should have been freed.

On June 19, 1865, Union Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger and his troops arrived at Galveston. Granger brought with him General Order No. 3 which read, in part, “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.”

The following year, the now-free people of Texas began celebrating Juneteenth. For a long time, the holiday was predominantly recognized in Texas, but eventually spread across the nation as Black Texans moved outside the state.

In June of 2021, following a nationwide racial justice movement sparked by the murder of George Floyd a year prior, President Joe Biden signed bipartisan legislation making Juneteenth a national holiday, the first new holiday since Martin Luther King Jr. Day was created in 1983.