4th Annual Juneteenth Cultural Mixer

In addition to honoring this true day of freedom for the Black community in the United States, we will be capping off a month of celebrating the centennial of the Negro League team the Harrisburg Giants playing in Lancaster and our place within the storied history of baseball. Baseball was a cornerstone of early Juneteenth celebrations throughout the late 1800s and early 1900s as an act of freedom and autonomy until the game was desegregated in 1947.

Crispus Attucks Community Center serves as both a megaphone and safe space for Black and Brown voices in Lancaster, and it is with great pride for honoring a historic past and building a thriving future that we come together to celebrate Juneteenth!

History of Juneteenth

You may be familiar with the Emancipation Proclamation, in which President Abraham Lincoln in 1862 declared the millions of enslaved people in the United States to be free. But what you may not realize is that despite this order, human enslavement didn’t end for much of the country until years later.

Because word traveled slowly back then, and because many enslavers refused to obey the proclamation, Black people in deep southern states continued to be held in illegal and immoral conditions, including in Texas, where people continued to enslave humans even after the Civil War ended in April of 1865.

• June 18, 1865: Union Army General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, with 2,000 troops to occupy the state on behalf of the federal government and to enforce the conditions of the Confederacy’s surrender, which included an end to slavery.
• June 19, 1865: General Granger read aloud the declaration announcing the total abolition of slavery in Texas. Juneteenth celebrations were common until a decline during the Jim Crow era, and then the holiday spread during the Great Migration, a time between 1916 and 1970 when 6 million African American families moved out of the rural Southern United States.
• 1979: Texas was the first state to establish Juneteenth as an official state holiday.
• 2019: Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf signed into law Act 9, designating June 19 as “Juneteenth National Freedom Day,” an official state holiday.
• 2021: Juneteenth became a national holiday.

As of 2023, all 50 states and the District of Columbia recognize Juneteenth as a state holiday, a ceremonial holiday, or a day of observance, and we feel grateful to celebrate Juneteenth with the Lancaster community every year!