VEMA, (Voices for Ethnic and Multicultural Awareness) Executive Director Nathaniel Coward talks about the Juneteenth holiday during Friday's celebration on Chestnut Street in Virginia Friday afternoon. . The Juneteenth holiday celebrates the end of slavery in the United States and commemorates the day in 1865 when Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas and announced that enslaved people were free-more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed.