HOLLAND (WHTC-AM/FM) – Holland’s first Freedom Family Festival, a celebration of community and empowerment — an observation of Juneteenth, drew a crowd undeterred by Saturday’s cool temperatures and an unfulfilled threat of thunderstorms.
Holland-area residents have observed Juneteenth for 19 years. This year the festival shifted, without giving up music, food, and information booths. The focus expanded to include two scholarships, one for academic excellence, the other for the student who had overcome significant odds to do well in school, and the festival, renamed Freedome Family Festival, expanded to include recruiting for leadership development and other community groups for teens and adults, with an awareness of the U.S. element of the African diaspora.
Juneteenth is the nickname of the anniversary of June 19, 1865, the date the last U.S. slaves, in Texas, learned they’d been freed by President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, signed on Jan. 1, 1863, granting freedom to an estimated 4 million people — and the right of black men to join the U.S. armed forces. By the end of the Civil War, some 200,000 had served as Union soldiers and sailors.
Over time, the Texas June 19 celebrations expanded to all U.S. states, and “June 19th” was shortened to Juneteenth.
This year the 154th anniversary falls on Wednesday, June 19. This year marks 400 years since the first people of African countries arrived in the U.S. and were sold as slaves here.
Slavery’s legacy has resulted in many challenges for generations of families, from something as simple as not being able to trace their own family’s history to an ongoing struggle for basic civil rights, such as property ownership — a practice called redlining, which led to community segregation still evident today — access to education and jobs, and voting rights.
See a photo gallery from Saturday’s celebration: https://whtc.com/galleries/6720/
