The Vancouver NAACP has announced that it will hold its annual Juneteenth Celebration from 10:30 a.m. to noon Saturday.
The celebration is typically an all-day community event at Clark College, but this year’s event will be held via a virtual meeting due to COVID-19. The event is open to everyone, but registration is required at naacpvancouverwa.org.
This year’s celebration theme is “We Are Done Dying,” and ties in with a national NAACP campaign that calls for policy changes to eliminate systematic racism and the death and disenfranchisement of African Americans.
Juneteenth commemorates the freeing of slaves in Texas on June 19, 1865, when Major General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston with about 2,000 troops more than two years after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.
