CHARLESTON, W.Va. — The City of Charleston plans to hold their Juneteenth events on Friday, a day after the federal holiday.
Festivities surrounding Juneteenth, which takes place annually on June 19th, will get underway in Charleston on Friday kicking off with a parade at the MLK Junior Community Center at 11:30 a.m. down to City Center Slack Plaza.
A Juneteenth festival will then get underway at Slack Plaza from noon until 4 p.m. The event will feature about 40 different informational and educational vendors, local musical acts, poetry readings and a prayer tent.
Ray Whiting
Juneteenth Committee Chair Ray Whiting said they will also be talking about important political issues such as voter registration.
He encourages everyone to come out and celebrate Juneteenth despite the events being a day late.
“A lot of stuff that we will have taking place there, and we invite the public to come there and bring their friends and family,” Whiting said.
Whiting said he knows it should be a good turn out despite it not being on the actual holiday.
This comes after Governor Patrick Morrisey made the decision to not give state workers the day off for Juneteenth like what had typically been done in the past during the Justice Administration.
Whiting said they had a feeling to move the events to Friday ahead of when Morrisey made the decision.
“We chose to move it to Friday, because we felt that he was going to cancel this, and so we decided to be proactive and move it to Friday,” he said.
Juneteenth commemorates one of the last major steps toward the complete abolishment of slavery in the United States when Union troops arrived in Galveston, Texas on June 19, 1865 at the end of the Civil War and proclaimed that the more than 250,000 enslaved black people there were free.
Whiting said the purpose of Juneteenth is to acknowledge and commemorate the history of African Americans.
“It’s our independence,” Whiting said. “When America became America in 1776, black folks were still slaves, and President Lincoln came with the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, but at that point, all slaves weren’t free.”
Slavery was officially abolished on a nationwide scale in December 1865 when Congress ratified the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
While most of the Charleston Juneteenth festivities will be held Friday, Whiting said there will be a fireside chat at the Charleston Coliseum and Convention Center Thursday evening from 5:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. with award-winning journalist Roland Martin.