Shameka Bogan didn’t grow up celebrating Juneteenth. Raised in a small town in Alabama, she said the Fourth of July was the holiday that brought out flags, fireworks, grilled meats and family pride.
“I had heard of Juneteenth and I kind of knew what it was but the Fourth of July was a huge thing for us,” Bogan said. “Even as a Black child growing up in the South, it was like something was missing.”
That something, she would later discover when she moved to north Minneapolis, was Juneteenth, the federal holiday marking June 19, 1865, when enslaved people in Texas finally learned they were free, more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation…