🌞HELIOPHILIA🌞

hmm… 

Happy Juneteenth! I wanted to collaborate with some talented animators & designers to create this gif to celebrate the holiday. You can watch the full version with audio here. 

Today we honor Juneteenth, which refers to June 19, 1865, when Union general Gordon Granger read out federal orders declaring that all people previously enslaved in Texas were free. Although the Emancipation Proclamation had formally freed people who were enslaved two and a half years earlier, these orders extended the Proclamation to more than 250,000 people in Texas, the most remote of the former Confederate states. While legally binding, these orders did not enable the freedom of people who were previously enslaved, and those who acted on the news risked violence and terror to actualize their rights. Through grassroots efforts, Black people in Texas reclaimed June 19 as “Juneteenth” a year later, in 1866, and it continues today as a celebration of Black liberation across the country.⁠

To learn more, see Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “What Is Juneteenth?”