When Frederick Douglass delivered his speech “What to the slave is the 4th of July?” in 1852 before the start of the Civil War, he laid bare the distance between the country’s founding ideals and the reality of life for millions of enslaved people. Thirteen years later, on June 19, 1865, 2,000 Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas, to announce the end of both the Civil War and slavery to 250,000 people still in bondage.