Amid the coronavirus pandemic, organizers of Juneteenth events in the District of Columbia have taken to the streets, their computers and their front yards to commemorate the day in 1865 when the last enslaved blacks learned they were free.
The community activism nonprofit ONE DC has traded in its usual festival and learning events for marches on freedom and canceling rent, plus a virtual “after party” featuring music and spoken-word poetry.
“We’re trying to tie these issues together and emphasize we can say ’Black Lives Matter,’ but these are the things that we need to do to ensure black lives matter,” said Claire Cook, administrative organizer for ONE DC.
Dozens of other protests, rallies and front-yard parties are planned to take place across the city, too.
Once an extravagantly celebrated holiday, Juneteenth fell into near obscurity before being revived in the 1970s. Only Hawaii, and North and South Dakota don’t observe the day as a holiday.
Last week, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam said he would put forward legislation to make Juneteenth a paid state holiday, and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Wednesday that he would sign an executive order to do the same.
Meanwhile, the Trump campaign had planned to hold a rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on Juneteenth but decided to reschedule the event for Saturday after critics noted the importance of the holiday and Tulsa’s history as the site of one of the country’s largest race massacres.
On June 19, 1865, Union troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, and announced that the Civil War was over and that all enslaved blacks had been freed under the Emancipation Proclamation more than two years earlier.
Jami Durham, a historian at the Galveston Historical Foundation, said the troops marched across the town, sharing the message in churches and squares, and from Galveston “word of freedom spread.”
According to newspaper reports from the era, the annual “Emancipation Day” or “Jubilee” celebrations in Galveston to commemorate the day featured “monstrous and brilliant” parades, Ms. Durham says.
Later, annual festivities shifted to small gatherings among family members at beaches and in backyards, and eventually diminished during the 1950s and ’60s, when interracial harmony was the goal, Ms. Durham says.
The 1970s, however, brought a new tone to Juneteenth observances.
“Like what we’re seeing today [with] Black Lives Matter, with the emergence of the Black Power movement, African Americans were encouraged to revisit these public observances, and we saw a reemergence of public observances in Texas in the 1970s,” the historian said.
Texas in 1979 became the first state, by law, to recognize Juneteenth as an official state holiday. In 1980, the Galveston Historical Foundation and the city of Galveston hosted the first Juneteenth prayer breakfast.
Juneteenth is now celebrated in more than 200 cities across the country, Ms. Durham said.
“Typically, here, on a year that is COVID-free, we have multiple parades and picnics and speeches, church concerts, dance recitals, galas and banquets and the Juneteenth pageant, picnics, and then it all culminates with the prayer breakfast,” she said, referring to the disease caused by the new coronavirus.
Ms. Durham says she’s “proud” that businesses and governors are taking steps to celebrate Juneteenth as they have in Galveston for 40 years.
“There’s actually a movement that began here to make Juneteenth a national holiday. So perhaps if more individual governors step up and make it a state holiday, that momentum will keep rolling forward, and one day it will receive national significance,” she said.
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