BATON ROUGE - Capital city officials are closing the 19th Judicial District Court early in honor of Juneteenth, according to a Friday news release.

Officials say the 19th JDC will close at noon on Friday to honor, remember, and celebrate the commemoration of the end of slavery in the United States.

President Joe Biden officially declared Juneteenth a federal holiday, Thursday.

According to the Associated Press, the celebration's origins find their roots with a group of freed slaves in Galveston, Texas.

Though the Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves in the South in 1863, the order could not be enforced in many places until after the end of the Civil War in 1865.

Apparently, enslaved people in the Galveston area were not informed that they'd been freed until Union Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger and his troops arrived at Galveston on June 19, 1865, with news that the war had ended and that the enslaved were now free.

This occurred more than two months after Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant in Virginia.

Granger delivered General Order No. 3, which said: “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor.”

The next year, the freed African Americans began celebrating Juneteenth in Galveston.

To this day, its observance has continued on a national and even international basis.

Officials say the 19th Judicial District Court will reopen on Monday June 21, 2021.