U.S. President Joe Biden has signed a bill creating a public holiday to commemorate the end of slavery in America.

Juneteenth, on June 19, celebrates the emancipation of the last enslaved American Americans in 1865.

It is the first new federal holiday since Martin Luther King Jr. Day was established in 1983.

The BBC's David Willis reports.

[Reporter]
Juneteenth marks the day Union soldiers arrived in the coastal city of Galveston, Texas, to deliver the news that the last African American slaves were free.

Speaking at the White House, President Biden said Juneteenth would be a day on which the country would remember what he called "America's original sin" -- the terrible toll that slavery has taken on the country.

Juneteenth has aquired additional resonance in the light of the protests against police brutality and racial inequality that followed last year's death of George Floyd at the hand of a white Minneapolis police officer.