Indy Juneteenth Festival part of weekend celebrations in the city

Indianapolis celebrates Juneteenth National Independence Day this weekend with block parties, festivals and a parade. The annual national holiday is Monday June 19.

Mark Johnson attended the Indy Juneteenth festival at Military Park downtown. He said Juneteenth is an opportunity to celebrate Black culture.

“It's an opportunity for other people in other cultures to become aware of the contributions,” Johnson said. “But not only the contributions, but also just all of the beauty and the different flavors of this holiday.”

Junteenth commemorates the day in 1865, two months after the Confederate army surrendered, when Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas to order freedom for enslaved people. That was two years after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.

“The history of this holiday speaks to people of color, people that look like me, who were a part of the Transatlantic Slave trade,” Johnson said. “And so celebrating that freedom, that freedom that we eventually had and fought for, and, you know, in a lot of ways, we're still fighting for it.

It was first officially celebrated in Texas in 1938. President Biden declared it a federal holiday in 2021. This year is the sixth annual Indianapolis Juneteenth celebration.