About the Parade
A celebration four centuries in the making.
The West Orange Juneteenth Parade & Festival is a unique, interactive experience designed to remember, to celebrate, and to reclaim hidden history. We trace a legacy that begins long before Emancipation and continues in every corner of our nation today.
A Living Legacy
From Africa to today.
"Black History" is not a footnote — it is a foundation. This timeline names a few of the moments we carry with us into every parade, which is designed to share other great moments.
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Pre-1619
Skills, knowledge, and culture from Africa
Centuries of agricultural mastery, metallurgy, medicine, mathematics, music, and oral tradition carried across the Atlantic.
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1619 – 1865
Enslavement and endurance
Through unspeakable brutality, enslaved Africans and their descendants built much of the nation's wealth — while also building families, faith, and culture that endured and is the basis for many great things that are seen as American today.
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June 19, 1865
Emancipation reaches Galveston
Union General Gordon Granger arrives in Galveston, Texas, announcing that all enslaved people are free — the moment we now know as Juneteenth.
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1865 – 1965
Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the long road
The descendants of the enslaved Africans built communities founded schools, businesses, towns, and movements. A century of struggle for the citizenship promised in 1865.
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1965 – Today
Civil rights, culture, and continuation
From the Voting Rights Act to the present, generations of leadership, art, science, food, medicine, scholarship and service continue to shape the United States.
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2021
Juneteenth becomes a federal holiday
More than 156 years after Galveston, the nation formally recognizes June 19 as a day of remembrance and celebration. We recognize it as a symbol of our enduring strength and pride as well as a time to remember a hidden history and a stolen legacy.
Remember
We name the past honestly — its cruelty and its courage — so that future generations inherit truth, not myth.
Celebrate
We lift up the joy, genius, and beauty of Americans of African descent. Freedom is not only a release from chains; it is a way of living, loving, and creating.
Continue
We invest in young people, support Black-owned businesses, and build the West Orange and the nation our ancestors imagined.