On Thursday, June 17, 2021, President Biden signed a law making ‘Juneteenth’ – the day marking the end of slavery – is the first new federal holiday since 1983. Now, Juneteenth commemorates what took place on June 19, 1865, when union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas, and announced to enslaved Black people that they were free. The announcement came 2.5 years after the Emancipation Proclamation and two months after the Confederacy surrendered.

For millions, the commemoration is long overdue, and far more significant than just another day off. The effort to make it a national holiday goes back decades.

Often referred to as the Second American Revolution, the Civil War began in 1861 between northern and southern states over slavery and economic power. A year into the war, the US Congress passed the Confiscation Act of 1862, which authorized Union troops to seize Confederate property, including enslaved people. (The act also allowed the Union army to recruit Black soldiers.) Months later, on January 1, 1863, President Lincoln affirmed the aims of the act by issuing the final draft of the Emancipation Proclamation. The document declared that “all persons held as slaves … are, and henceforth, shall be free.”

While the proclamation legally liberated millions of enslaved people in the Confederacy, it exempted those in the Union-loyal border states of Delaware, Maryland, Missouri, and Kentucky. These states held Confederate sympathies and could have seceded; Lincoln exempted them from the proclamation to prevent this. A year later, in April 1864, the Senate attempted to close this loophole by passing the 13th Amendment, prohibiting slavery and involuntary servitude in all states, Union and Confederate. But the amendment wouldn’t be enacted by ratification until December 1865. In other words, it took two years for the emancipation of enslaved people to materialize legally.

Reconstruction (1863-1890) was a time to rebuild the Southern economy and society through the ratification of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments — which gave Black people freedom, due process, and the right to vote — Black-run Southern governments, and the work of the Freedmen’s Bureau, among other efforts. But the goals of Reconstruction were consistently countered by white supremacists.

Still, according to historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. noted, freedom wasn’t automatic for Texas’s 250,000 enslaved people. “On plantations, masters had to decide when and how to announce the news — or wait for a government agent to arrive — and it was not uncommon for them to delay until after the harvest,” he wrote.

Emancipation came gradually for many enslaved people, the culmination of a century of American abolition efforts, North and South. And even still, the formerly enslaved were viewed as chattel that merely existed to work and produce.

Now, the meaning of Juneteenth is being seized more broadly by activists as an opportunity for the United States to come to terms with how slavery continues to affect the lives of all Americans today, it is something for everyone, of every race, to engage in. Stereotypes about Black people as being subhuman and lacking rationality are rooted in slavery. These harmful notions still rear themselves today as police officers disproportionately kill Black people and the health care system fails to adequately care for Black bodies. Advocates and activists argue that the national holiday obviously wouldn’t put an end to racism but would rather help foster dialogue about the trauma that has resulted from the enslavement of 4 million people for more than 250 years.

Most states and Washington, D.C., already recognized Juneteenth as a holiday or day of observance, but only a handful considered it a paid holiday for state employees. Last year, for example, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo issued an executive order to make it a holiday for state workers, while farther south, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam did the same. Similarly, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio declared Juneteenth an official holiday for city departments and schools, and in Oregon, the Portland City Council made June 19 a paid holiday for city employees as well. Some businesses also give employees the day off: Twitter and the National Football League have both declared Juneteenth company holidays, but most companies have yet to follow suit.

It’s also not clear whether every state will honor Juneteenth as a paid holiday for state workers since neither Congress nor the president had ever declared a holiday binding all 50 states and some Americans aren’t sure whether Juneteenth should even be a federal holiday. In the May Gallup poll, 40 percent said as much, though that may be due in part to a lack of familiarity with the day and 28 percent of Americans said they knew “nothing at all” about Juneteenth. The latest bill’s passage through Congress is still historic. For starters, because of how costly and politically difficult it is to create federal holidays, there hasn’t been a new one since Congress passed a bill in 1983 to establish Martin Luther King Jr. Day. But it’s also a recognition of racial progress that challenges what celebrations have meant in this country.