Today is the third observance of Juneteenth National Independence Day. State employees in Louisiana began getting paid time off to observe Juneteenth the same year, but the first official Louisiana observance was in 2003.

A New Orleans man worked diligently for nearly 30 years to initiate the observances. 

John Mosley, a minister, first heard about Juneteenth in 1990. A blended word from “June” and “nineteenth,” Juneteenth marks the day in 1865 when enslaved people in Texas learned they were free.

John Mosley speaks at a June 19, 2000 Juneteenth event.
Credit: C-SPAN

“I was amazed, because I had lived all my life and never heard of the term Juneteenth,” Moseley told WDSU in 2021. “I learned that Juneteenth had been dormant in Louisiana for more than a 100 years from the first time when people in Galveston, Texas found out that Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation.” 

To ensure that others knew the significance of June 19, Mosley invited people from across the country to come to Christian Unity Baptist Church to celebrate it. 

“In 1995, the call for people to come to New Orleans for Juneteenth was made,” Mosley said in a recent New Orleans Magazine article. “At that time, there had never been a gathering of people from across the land for Juneteenth. People came.”

Following that success, Mosley organized events at City Park, ​​educational programs in churches and libraries and essay contests. He also formed the National Juneteenth Observance Foundation, which pushed for a Juneteenth national holiday. 

Mosley’s hard work paid off. 

In 2003, Louisiana began to observe the third Saturday in June as Juneteenth Day. President Joe Biden signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act into law on June 18, 2021. 

“It has been a long and winding road. But it has come to pass,” said Juneteenth Foundation Assistant Director Dereck Alexander. “Minster Mosley is a gentleman that I myself would say is the trailblazer and pioneer of Juneteenth.”

For more tales from New Orleans history, visit the Back in the Day archives.

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Tammy C. Barney is an award-winning columnist who spent most of her career at two major newspapers, The Times-Picayune and The Orlando Sentinel. She served as a bureau chief, assistant city editor, TV...