Around the Bay Area, Juneteenth events are scheduled to take place and celebrate Black culture, with a focus on music, art and food.
Spanning Friday to Sunday, the holiday’s festivities will occur across the entire region, with headliner events taking place in Oakland, San Jose and San Francisco.
Juneteenth commemorates the day Union troops of the Civil War made their way to Galveston, Texas, declaring the Emancipation Proclamation to free the nation’s final enslaved people. Observed annually on June 19, Juneteenth became an official federal holiday in 2021, signed into law by President Joe Biden.
However, the Bay Area has celebrated the holiday since long before it was nationally recognized. The region’s oldest continuously running Juneteenth celebration is San Francisco’s Juneteenth Freedom Celebration, which had its 80th anniversary on Saturday, when it kicked off regional festivities…