African Methodist Episcopal Church Celebrates Liberation

In Galveston, Texas, the last 250,000 enslaved persons were freed in the United States on June 19, 1865, two years after Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Today, in the same place, the African Methodist Episcopal Church - an independent Protestant denomination founded by Black Americans almost half a century before the Civil War - is front and center on Juneteenth, the anniversary of the day that Union General Gordon Granger informed the enslaved persons of Galveston that they were free.