The library will be closed on Thursday, June 19 in honor of Juneteenth. We will reopen on Friday, June 20 for our regularly scheduled hours (7:30 am to 5:00 pm).
Want to learn more about Juneteenth? The library can help you with that.
Juneteenth commemorates the end of chattel slavery in the United States in 1865. While the Emancipation Proclamation was signed two years earlier, the last enslaved people were not freed until the end of the Civil War, in Galveston, Texas, in 1865. You can read more about Juneteenth in the Encyclopedia of African American History, online. If you want to dig a little deeper into the history, check out On Juneteenth by Annette Gordon-Reed (available in print in the library) or Juneteenth: The Story Behind the Celebration by Edward T. Cotham (available online with an SSU account).
Juneteenth became a federal holiday in 2021. You can learn more about Juneteenth as a holiday, including information about the state and federal legislation designated it has such, at congress.gov.
You might also want to check out the posthumously published novel by Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth. The novel was compiled from over 2,000 pages of material he had written over a period of 40 years by his literary executor John F. Callahan.
And the Sonoma State Office of Equity and Belonging has created page with links to more information about Juneteenth.