In Oakland, the 9th annual Black Joy Parade brought thousands of people out to celebrate Black culture and community.<\/p>\n
The parade kicked off down Broadway this afternoon with people lining up the sidewalks for a good spot to watch.<\/p>\n
\u201cEvery time they have it I miss it, this time I\u2019m in it,\u201d Brenda McGaffie said.<\/p>\n
McGaffie came to watch her sorority in the parade and experience the sense of Black culture, creativity and joy in Oakland.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re doing something, and Oakland is moving and moving up,\u201d McGaffie said.<\/p>\n
Spectators waved or cheered for each group on the route.\u00a0Some tell us it\u2019s a can\u2019t-miss annual event, for others it was their first time here.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m here to celebrate our students who are performing in the parade today,\u201d Lauren of Hayward said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was like \u2018I\u2019m going to go and I\u2019m going! I\u2019m going to drop what I\u2019m doing right after church to go\u2019, so I came right after church and I\u2019m really excited to be here today,\u201d Veletta of San Francisco said.<\/p>\n
The parade brought out thousands of people.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt celebrates joy and that could mean liberation, that could mean just pride in who you are, that could mean so many things and we\u2019re just here to create space for people to show up and be joyous,\u201d Executive Producer of Black Joy Parade Paige Nicholson said.<\/p>\n
There was joy at both the parade and festival.\u00a0Organizers say it keeps growing.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have over 100 vendors this is year 9. I think we had about 80 or so vendors and we\u2019ve grown every single year,\u201d Maya Sykes said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Oakland, the 9th annual Black Joy Parade brought thousands of people out to celebrate Black culture and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":189533,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[143,145,144],"class_list":{"0":"post-189532","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-oakland","8":"tag-oakland","9":"tag-oakland-headlines","10":"tag-oakland-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189532","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=189532"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189532\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/189533"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=189532"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=189532"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=189532"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}