Recognized as a federal holiday in 2021, when the 117th U.S. Congress enacted and President Joe Biden signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act into law, it is celebrated annually on June 19 to commemorate the ending of slavery in the United States. President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, effective on January 1, 1863, declared that the enslaved in Confederate-controlled areas (and thus almost all slaves) were free. In January 1865, Congress finally proposed the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution for national abolition of slavery. Texas was the last Confederate slave state, where enforcement of the proclamation was declared on June 19, 1865.