Organizers prepare for this year’s Juneteenth

WASHINGTON — Organizers from Washington For Justice, along with other volunteers, say they’ve got a new format for this year’s Juneteenth (June 19) holiday, which celebrates the date the last slaves in the U.S. were informed of their emancipation and freed in Galveston, Texas.

Whereas 2022’s festivities spanned a whole week leading up to the holiday, this year’s are more low key, with events on Sunday and Monday organized by the Washington United Methodist Church and area organization Washington For Justice.

“I think everyone enjoyed the events, it was just hard to recreate and sustain that again,” Washington For Justice Juneteenth Commission Chair Dan Henderson said. “So we kind of paired it back some, not because we wanted to diminish the holiday in any way, but we kind of refocused.”

The schedule for this year’s celebrations includes:

Anthony DeVaughn, pastor at Washington United Methodist Church and a fellow organizer of Juneteenth events this year, said he was glad for the opportunity to share the story of his father, a longtime Washington resident who was born in Alabama in 1930.

“He’s been in Iowa now for 40-plus years, and he’s a staple of Washington,” he said. “When I got here, I was known as, ‘Are you George’s son?’” he said. “When my dad moved here, there were probably, virtually no Blacks here … people are going to go, ‘I had no idea what this man went through.’”

DeVaughn, who is Black, said that it was important to recognize the end of slavery in America with its own, dedicated holiday. While July 4 also represents American ideals of freedom and fairness, he said it wasn’t founded with such a universal intent in 1776. Juneteenth, then accomplishes exactly that: a celebration of freedom for truly everyone.

“I don’t want to get too political … but we can’t talk about being free unless everybody’s free,” he said. “I think they’re both a footprint in American history that you can’t ignore … we’re talking about American history, and slavery is a part of American history. We just don’t want to talk about it.”

The cause to celebrate is bipartisan: Juneteenth was first declared a federal holiday by President Joe Biden in 2021 with nearly unanimous support from the House and Senate.

Henderson said, "Politics (didn’t) play into our planning,“ and emphasized Juneteenth’s importance to every American in all walks of life.

That doesn’t mean the date is apolitical, however, as a commemoration of a policy change that was highly controversial at the time. While it can be tricky to balance such historical implications with partisan views, DeVaughn said that made Juneteenth all the more important to recognize.

”It is something that, if we don’t sit down at a table and talk about it, it will continue nibbling at us and gnawing at us,“ he said. ”We have to start talking, and not pretend that these issues and these things didn’t happen. They’re real.“

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