Celebrating Juneteenth
By DR. JOYNICOLE MARTINEZ, Staff Writer For more than 400 years, the economy of our country and white Americans' wealth were built with the unpaid labor of the Black people they enslaved. The Emancipation Proclamation, signed in 1863 during the American Civil War, ordered the release of enslaved people. But the timeline and path were slow and brutal for the four million enslaved people to whom freedom was promised. Many