The City of Kissimmee will host an indoor/outdoor Juneteenth celebration this Saturday from 12-4 p.m. along Dakin Avenue and in the Kissimmee Civic Center.
“It’s somewhat set up like a block party,” Kissimmee City Commissioner Angela Eady said. “There will be food vendors, multiple vendors, a couple of [live] acts, the whole nine yards. It’s an event that everybody can come out and enjoy, sit back, and relax.”
Eady, the first black Commissioner in Kissimmee in almost 50 years, said the city has changed over the decades.
“We want to make sure everyone is represented here in our city, because we promote so much diversity,” she said. “We want everybody to feel that they have the appropriate voice for their communities. We are very diverse, but we don’t want to be divided. That’s the main focus. We accept and appreciate that diversity, but we don’t want to promote division.”
Juneteenth—sometimes called “America’s Second Independence Day”—honors the date that the last enslaved people in the Confederate States learned that they had been freed. Although President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation went into effect Jan. 1, 1863, it took over two years for news of the Proclamation to reach Texas.
On June 19, 1865, Union troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, and Major General Gordon Granger issued General Orders, No. 3: “The people of Texas are informed that in accordance with a Proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection therefore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired laborer.”
Celebration broke out among the newly freed men, women, and children … and that celebration continues to this day.
While Juneteenth has long been celebrated in the African American community, June 19 officially became a federal holiday in 2021. Last year’s city celebration had to be canceled shortly before it began at the Kissimmee lakefront when severe thunderstorms rolled in, prompting a move to an indoor event for much of this year’s celebration.
