Juneteenth celebrates the end of slavery, and centers on the arrival of Union troops to Texas on June 19, 1865 with news of emancipation – although the Emancipation Proclamation had been issued 2 ½ years earlier. But Juneteenth did not mean immediate freedom for everyone. Enslaved people in Native American territories had to wait another year for freedom. And despite the legal end of slavery, white Southerners swiftly enacted racist laws, called “Black Codes,” that restricted Black people‘s freedom for decades to come.