Juneteenth Flag Ceremony Planned In Yardley

YARDLEY, PA — As the nation celebrates Juneteenth on Thursday, Yardley Borough will raise a flag for the federal holiday.

Also known as Emancipation Day, Freedom Day, and Jubilee Day, Juneteenth is the oldest-known celebration of the end of slavery in the United States.

In 2021, President Joe Biden signed legislation making it a federal holiday, the first since the addition of Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 1983.

In Yardley, a flag ceremony will be held from 6:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. at Yardley Borough Hall.

Soldiers who helped emancipate more than 250,000 enslaved people in Texas on June 19, 1865 — the date commemorating Juneteenth — were trained at a camp in Cheltenham Township.

Many of those troops traveled to Galveston, Texas, to free slaves two years after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. That was when word finally reached the last enslaved people in Texas that the Civil War had ended, and they were free.