You won’t find Juneteenth on most calendars, but it’s a date that marks a significant leap in American history, when the country took one of its most important moves toward fulfilling the potential of becoming a truly free nation.

More than two years after Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation went into effect in 1863, and months after the Civil War ended in April 1865, slaves in Texas continued to labor in servitude. Partly because of slow communications and Texas’ distance from the Civil War’s primary theaters, the state remained in Confederate hands even after troops elsewhere had laid down their arms.

Not until June 19, 1865, did Major General Gordon Granger lead a battalion of Union troops into Galveston to inform the town, and the state, that the war was over and the slaves were free.

The announcement set off a celebration among the black residents of Galveston — a celebration that would become an annual holiday in Texas known as Juneteenth. Commemorating the date when the slaves were freed in the last state of the former Confederacy, Juneteenth has since made its way across the nation.

Here in Chapel Hill, the Pine Knolls community will host a Juneteenth celebration on Saturday from noon to 6 p.m. Activities at the Pine Knolls community center and Lincoln Center field and administration building on Merritt Mill Road will include three-on-three basketball, health screenings for sickle cell and other diseases, moon bounce, face painting and a slam-dunk contest, among others.

“We are respecting, I think, the struggles that folks went through, and we are saying to ourselves, ‘Let us free ourselves today from many of the obstacles that hold us back from becoming all that we can be,’” said Theodore Parrish, president of the Pine Knolls Community Center.

Parrish also will use the celebration as an opportunity to continue the efforts to promote and raise money to bring a chapter of the Boys and Girls Club to Orange County.

There is no prescribed way to celebrate Juneteenth. Those who celebrate use it as a time of reflection and renewal, and to honor the sufferings of slavery and rejoice in the continued progress of the nation.

Each town that celebrates Juneteenth does it differently. It took time to spread, because, as became all too clear in the years and decades following the Civil War, emancipation was not going to be easy. Lincoln’s stroke of the pen was hardly enough to bring about true freedom or equality.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” reads the Declaration of Independence.

When that ideal was established, one group of people was notably excluded: black Americans. For decades after the nation was established, no American army or government would defend that principle for any descendant from Africa.

Even during the first years of the Civil War, Lincoln was reluctant to make slavery an explicit issue in the war.

In September 1862, however, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, to become effective on Jan. 1, 1863. The proclamation applied only to the states in rebellion; it took victory over those states by the Union forces to enforce it.

In Chapel Hill, the struggle for freedom was very much intertwined with the university. As the university grew, so did local reliance on slave labor, which built many of the original buildings and homes on campus and in the surrounding areas.

According to John Chapman’s dissertation, “On Black Freedom and the University of Carolina,” by 1850 six of the seven university professors owned multiple slaves. Paul Cameron, who was on the board of trustees, became the largest slave owner in Orange County with more than 1,000 slaves.

With economic ties came personal ones, which allowed some local black residents to gain their freedom. George Moses Horton’s struggle for freedom is probably Chapel Hill’s best-known such story.

Horton, born a slave in Chatham County, taught himself how to read and write. He tried to earn enough money to purchase his freedom by writing love poems for the university students. He charged 25 cents for a basic love poem and 50 cents for a juicy one.

Though unsuccessful in buying his freedom, along the way he managed to publish two books — one of them, “The Hope of Liberty,” was a protest against slavery.

Even before the Civil War there was a long struggle toward freedom within the black community. Between 1790 and 1860 the free black population in North Carolina increased from 5,041 to 30,463, according to the U.S. census.

By 1860, one-fifth of the black population in Chapel Hill had earned freedom, either by purchasing it or by being born to a free black person.

Black Chapel Hillians learned of their emancipation much more quickly their counterparts in Texas.

On April 17, 1865, Gen. Smith D. Atkins of the Union military entered the town and without resistance established the end of the war and the end of legal slavery.