Parades, picnics and lessons in history were offered Saturday to commemorate Juneteenth in the U.S., a day that carried even more significance after Congress and President Joe Biden approved a federal holiday to observe the end of slavery.
A new holiday was "really awesome. It's starting to recognize the African American experience," said Detroit artist Hubert Massey, 63. "But we still have a long way to go."
In Detroit, which is about 80% Black, students from University Prep Art & Design School dodged rain to repaint Massey's block-long message, "Power to the People," which was created last year on downtown's Woodward Avenue.
The "o" in "Power" was a red fist in memory of George Floyd and other victims of excessive force by police, Massey said.
"We did the original," said Olivia Jones, 15, leaning on a long paint roller. "It's important that we return and share that same energy."
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Juneteenth commemorates June 19, 1865, when Union soldiers carried the news of freedom to enslaved Black people in Galveston, Texas, two months after the Confederacy had surrendered. It was about 2½ years after the Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves in Southern states.
Biden on Thursday signed a bill creating Juneteenth National Independence Day. Since June 19 fell on a Saturday, the government observed the holiday Friday. At least nine states have designated it an official paid state holiday, all but one acting after Floyd, a Black man, was killed last year in Minneapolis.
In Galveston, the birthplace of the holiday, celebrations included the dedication of a 5,000-square-foot mural titled "Absolute Equality."
Opal Lee, 94, who was at Biden's side when he signed the bill, returned to Fort Worth to lead a 2½-mile walk symbolizing the 2½ years it took for slaves in Texas to find out they'd been freed.
Officials in Bristol, R.I., unveiled a marker that describes the seaport's role in the slave trade. It's at the Linden Place Museum, a mansion built by Gen. George DeWolf, who was a slave trader. The Rhode Island Slave History Medallion organization raises public awareness about the state's role in slavery.
A street in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., on Saturday was renamed for civil rights activists Harry and Harriette Moore. Harry Moore was credited with registering more than 100,000 Black voters. The couple were killed on Christmas Day 1951 -- their 25th wedding anniversary -- when a bomb exploded under their bed.
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The final scene of a movie about the Moores, "The Price For Freedom," was also being shot.
"They were ordinary people who brought about extraordinary change, and we are privileged to pay tribute to them here in Broward County," said county Commissioner Dale V.C. Holness.
Hundreds of people gathered for a free concert in New York's Times Square organized by The Broadway League, the trade group for the Broadway entertainment industry.
A Juneteenth parade was held in Evanston, Ill., a Chicago suburb that is using tax revenue from marijuana sales to offer housing grants to Black residents for past discrimination and the lingering effects of slavery.
Sacramento's Black community has organized Juneteenth festivals for 20 years, and this year's featured a parade, talent show, food fair, the reading of the Emancipation Proclamation and even a golf tournament.
"This is the first Juneteenth where it's being recognized nationally and socially, by the masses and not just within the Black community," organizer Gary Simon said. "We've seen an uptick in non-Black folks coming here for the last several years, and I'm seeing the difference in just the conversations taking place today."
New York civil rights activist the Rev. Al Sharpton offered a tough message during a speech at his National Action Network, saying Senate Republicans who voted unanimously to make Juneteenth a federal holiday should also support Democratic bills that change voting laws and make it easier to crack down on rogue police officers.
"The celebration of Juneteenth is not a party. ... The way to deal with Juneteenth now is to deal with where race is in 2021," Sharpton said.
In Portland, Maine, Joe Kings said his great-great-great-grandmother was enslaved. He has a picture of her on the wall of his auto detailing shop. As he has for years, Kings commemorated Juneteenth with a barbecue for adults and activities for kids.
"It's a little bit more celebratory knowing that it's official," Kings said, referring to his annual tradition and the new holiday. "I'm not saying we were in the closet about it, but now it's more widely recognized -- and more importantly understood."
TAKING IN THE MOMENT
Standing at the site in Galveston where on June 19, 1865, a Union general signed an order notifying enslaved African Americans that they were free, artist Reginald Adams marveled at the moment he found himself in.
What would a Black man of that era think about seeing him, another Black man, painting a mural commemorating emancipation, he wondered.
"I realized, 'Reginald, you are your ancestors' wildest imagination,'" Adams said.
Using 320 gallons of paint over two months, Adams and his team created the 5,000-square-foot mural that was dedicated Saturday during nationwide commemorations of the event that came to be known as Juneteenth.
The celebration of emancipation of Black Americans has long been a regional holiday observed mainly in Texas, which was the first state to formally recognize it in 1980, but it gained wider recognition last summer amid the national reckoning over killings by the police and persistent racial inequities in America. Major corporations and several states adopted Juneteenth as a paid holiday, and Thursday it took on new significance when the president signed the legislation.
"Now Juneteenth is on the mass consciousness of America," Adams said.
The most recent federal holiday to be recognized was Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 1983, and nearly two decades passed before it was celebrated in all 50 states. Of the now 11 federal holidays, the only other one adopted after 1950 was Memorial Day.
But as holidays gain wider recognition, they can become divorced from their original meaning, as they become tied to retail sales or generic festivities. Joy Bivins, who starts work as the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture on Monday, said she hopes Juneteenth avoids that fate.
"I think holidays like MLK Day and Juneteenth, they kind of require a little bit more," she said. "I would hope that rather than shop, people would maybe read or learn something or wrestle with the complexity of holidays like that."
Bivins welcomed the designation of Juneteenth as a holiday but noted that an array of societal problems still challenge the freedom of Black Americans.
"We are still dealing with the remnants of this long shadow of the system of enslavement," she said. "What are the other ways that we can ensure that we are celebrating a continued expansion of freedom for people?"
Maurice Cook, an organizer with the activist organization ONE DC, said he was pleased that the holiday had gained prominence but noted that it did little to address the underlying problems of racism and economic inequality.
"Juneteenth is more about a global justice that we're still waiting for," he said as he sat listening to the celebrations taking place in the Washington, D.C., neighborhood of Anacostia. "We lose people on a daily basis."
Cook, 50, grew up in Maryland celebrating the holiday with his family, "loving each other, being together."
"We have to celebrate that we survived," he said.
Others balked at the government holiday. Imani Fox, who was at the same Washington event as Cook, said it was an empty gesture if members of Congress were also standing in the way of protecting voting rights.
"It being recognized as a federal holiday does not do much for Black people," said Fox, 24.
Early Juneteenth celebrations usually incorporated some form of education, like recitations of works by famous African Americans or instructions for newly freed men on how to vote for the first time.
At Herbert Von King Park in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood Saturday, small businesses set up their booths for the day's events alongside corporate sponsors like the Brooklyn Nets and Emblem Health.
Nicole Clare, 43, watched as her 3-year-old daughter, Autumn, ran gleefully around the booths. Clare's family is Jamaican, and she said she was new to celebrating Juneteenth.
"I think the education component is really key," she said. "My daughter, having an African American background, it was important for me to bring that element to her."
Along with education, those early celebrations were also just that: celebrations. They were days for parades, for picnics, for a barbecue.
More than anything, Juneteenth has always been a day of communion and of deciding to be with loved ones, a radical practice for the newly freed.
"Every day, I wake up and decide, what the hell am I going to do today?" said Adams, the muralist in Galveston. "If you're a slave, that's not even part of your psyche."
About 300 people gathered under white tents in the 90-degree heat for the dedication of his mural, including some who traveled from as far away as San Diego. A band played, and authors signed their books.
Ty Perry, 58, was part of a group of cyclists who rode to the event from League City, Texas, 50 miles away.
"Today means everything," Perry said. "It took long for my grandfathers and grandmothers before me to pave the way for this."
Nearby, Naomi Carrier, a 74-year-old artist and educator, wept with joy.
"I just know so much about the history that it comes out of me in the form of tears," she said. "I am happy. I am ecstatic. I am good."
Information for this article was contributed by Ed White, Jamie Stengle, Kelli Kennedy, David Sharp, Julie Walker and Daisy Nguyen of The Associated Press; and by Aidan Gardiner and other staff members of The New York Times.
