This year, many Juneteenth events have been revamped as virtual or cancelled altogether as the coronavirus pandemic disproportionately threatens the African American community the holiday represents, commemorating the end of slavery.

But with continuing protests against racism sparked by the police killing of George Floyd, calls for national police reforms during the celebration and federal recognition of the holiday are growing in urgency.

Organizers of the “I, too, am America: Juneteenth Rally for Justice” in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where Donald Trump postponed a campaign speech planned for the holiday, announced that the civil rights leader Al Sharpton would be the keynote speaker to “call for sweeping reforms within the Tulsa police department and nationwide”.

As federal and state governments respond to the anti-racism protests nationwide, Dr Lopez Matthews of Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn Library and Research Center said the present uprisings represented Black Americans’ continuing quest for equality, inherited from the Juneteenth’s original celebrants who fought for their freedom.

Combining the words “June” and “19th”, the holiday commemorates the anniversary of the day in 1865 when the Union army major general Gordon Granger read out Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation to remaining enslaved African Americans on a plantation in Galveston, Texas.