Trump defends holding rally on day commemorating ‘end of US slavery’

Amid protests against racial injustice, President Donald Trump is defending his decision to schedule his first campaign rally in months on a day commemorating the end of US slavery and in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a city where white mobs massacred African-Americans a century ago.

Trump, seeking re-election on Nov 3, scheduled the Tulsa rally for June 19, a day celebrated as Juneteenth. On that date in 1865, Texas became the last of the pro-slavery Confederate states forced to comply with President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation during the Civil War declaring all people held as slaves free.