Jack Dorsey, the chief executive and a founder of Twitter and Square, a mobile payment company on Tuesday said that both companies are making “Juneteenth” a holiday for employees in commemoration of the end of slavery in the United States.
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“Both Twitter and Square are making #Juneteenth (June 19th) a company holiday in the US, forevermore. A day for celebration, education, and connection.” Dorsey said in a tweet.
Countries and regions around the world have their own days to celebrate emancipation, and we will do the work to make those dates company holidays everywhere we are present.
— jack (@jack) June 9, 2020
He added in a follow-up tweet that Twitter and Square will work to make company holidays of days celebrating emancipation in other countries where it operates.
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The announcement came on the same day as the funeral for George Floyd, the black man who died last month after a Minneapolis police officer put his knee on his neck for nearly nine minutes.
Juneteenth (a portmanteau of “June” and “nineteenth”) set for each June 19 marks the day in 1865 that the Union soldiers, led by Major General Gordon Granger, landed at Galveston, Texas with news that the war had ended and that the enslaved were now free.
President Abraham Lincoln more than two years earlier had issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which went into effect at the start of 1863. The arrival of Union troops in Texas provided needed strength to overcome resistance there to freeing slaves, according to Juneteenth.com.
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