Juneteenth is on Wednesday this year, but local communities started the celebrations early, with flag-raising ceremonies and festivities taking place in Lynn, Lynnfield, Marblehead, and Swampscott.
The Juneteenth Association held its annual flag-raising ceremony at Lynn City Hall on June 11, as members of the community relaxed to smooth jazz and R&B tunes.
Lynnfield for Love held a two-part celebration on June 17. Starting at the Lynnfield Middle School, members of the community went on a tribute walk for Opal Lee, an activist who worked to have Juneteenth named a federal holiday, to the Town Common, and concluded the event with the flag-raising ceremony.
The Town of Swampscott began celebrating with the Juneteenth Jubilee on June 12 at the Town Hall’s lawn.
The Marblehead Task Force Against Discrimination hosted its fourth annual Juneteenth ceremony on June 12 at Abbot Hall.
The holiday commemorates when Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger marched into Galveston, Texas with 2,000 federal troops on June 19, 1865 and read an order announcing that enslaved people in the state had been freed “in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States.” It became a federal holiday in 2021.
Although President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, granting freedom to “all persons held as slaves” in the 10 Confederate states, his order was not enforced until Union soldiers could advance into the Confederate states after Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered at the Appomattox, Va. courthouse on April 9, 1865, ending the Civil War.
While Juneteenth has only been recognized as a federal holiday for the past three years, it has been an important holiday for Black Americans for more than a century and a half.
Formerly enslaved people in Texas organized the first Jubilee Day to celebrate their freedom on June 19, 1866. Texas was also the first state to make Juneteenth a state holiday, in 1980, and other states followed over the next several decades.
The holiday also goes by other names, such as Jubilee Day, Freedom Day, Emancipation Day, and Black Independence Day.
