On June 19th 1865, Major General Gordon Granger arrived in the port of Galveston, Texas and took command of the recently-landed garrison of around 2000 federal troops there. The Confederates in Texas had surrendered a couple of weeks earlier on June 2nd and Granger immediately ordered that all Texas’ enslaved peoples be freed in accordance with Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation which had been signed two years earlier on January 1st, 1863 in the midst of the Civil War. Oddly enough, this wasn’t the end of slavery in the United States since the Emancipation Proclamation only affected Confederate states leaving slavery legal in Delaware and Kentucky, members of the union, until the 13th Amendment to the Constitution completely outlawed it in December 1865.
This photo shows a panel from the Texas African American History Memorial in the grounds of the Texas State Capitol in Austin commemorating the emancipation of enslaved people in the state. The monument by sculptor Ed Dwight was installed in 2016.
For the technically inclined...