City Open on Juneteenth, Banks, Post Offices, Stock Market Closed

Although Monday is a federal holiday, the city is open for business.

President Joe Biden signed a bill in 2021 making Juneteenth a national holiday after the House and the Senate passed the bill in a rare showing of bipartisanship, but it is not a state holiday in California.

Since the newest federal holiday fell on a Sunday this year, Monday is when banks are closed, mail will not be delivered and the stock market closes in recognition.

Juneteenth commemorates the end of slavery in the United States. It is the oldest nationally celebrated event marking the ending of slavery in the United States.

On June 19, 1865, two and a half years after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, Union soldiers, led by Major General Gordon Granger, landed at Galveston, Texas with news that the war had ended and that the slaves there were free.

Pasadena was incorporated on June 19, 1886 and many abolitionists came to the Pasadena/Altadena area, including John Brown’s son Owen and Ellen Garrison Clark.

The Emancipation Proclamation only freed slaves in confederate states waging war against the union, leaving Black people in border states that remained loyal to the Union slaves, a fact consistently omitted from history books.

And African Americans in some places were forced to endure brutality due to the lack of available Union troops to enforce the new Executive Order which went into effect on Jan. 1. 1863.

The call to declare Juneteenth a national holiday was more than a decade old when Biden signed the law declaring it a federal holiday.