11th Annual Rochester Juneteenth Celebration

Last weekend, I joined 1,000 fellow Rochester residents at Susan B. Anthony Square to celebrate the 11th annual local Juneteenth Celebration. Juneteenth is the celebration of the end of slavery in the United States. The Emancipation Proclamation went into effect on Jan. 1, 1863, but it wasn’t until June 19, 1865, that slaves in Galveston, Texas, got word that the Civil War had ended and all the enslaved were free.