Riverbluff Church Sermons

This past Wednesday our nation celebrated “Juneteenth”! The holiday, with it’s name derived by combining the month “June” and the ordinal number “nineteenth”, became a national holiday in 2021. While Juneteenth, also known as Emancipation Day and Jubilee Day has only been celebrated nationally for a few years, it has actually been celebrated since 1866, starting one year after General Gordon Granger publicly read “General Order Number 3” in Galveston, Texas on June 19, 1865. General Order Number 3 began: “The people of Texas are informed that in accordance with a Proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired laborer.” While the proclamation became law of the land in 1865, it would be many, many years before the freedoms and equities described in the proclamation would begin to become real