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.