Henry Louis Gates Jr. told CBS News that marking Juneteenth as a federal holiday was a long time coming.
. The day, June 19, marks the date in 1865 when the last enslaved people in America were finally freed.
By day, Gates is a professor and the director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. By night, he's the host and producer of the PBS genealogy show"Finding Your Roots," along with countless documentaries on Black history.
"Well, we were raised to think that Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, right? The problem is that the Emancipation Proclamation, in and of itself, didn't have the power to free anybody," he said."It only applied to enslaved people in the Confederacy, and it can only be enforced if Union troops had captured territory in the South, in the Confederacy."
He detailed why many historians believe that enslaved people in Texas knew about the Emancipation Proclamation before it had been issued there.
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