Tyeastia Green Shortly after moving to Burlington last year for a job in city government, Tyeastia Green pitched her new colleagues on celebrating Juneteenth. Green, the Queen City s first director of racial equity, inclusion and belonging, had fond memories of the holiday from growing up in Minneapolis. Yet Green, who was then the city s only Black department head, says she was met with confused looks when she first mentioned the event. It s a portmanteau of June 19, the day in 1865 when enslaved African Americans in Galveston, Texas, learned that they were free, more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed.