Juneteenth, celebrated on June 19, marks the day enslaved African Americans in Galveston, Texas, were finally told they were free under the terms of the 1862 Emancipation Proclamation.<\/p>\n
For nearly a decade, SD Melanin has hosted an annual Juneteenth festival at Waterfront Park in San Diego to honor that history. This Saturday, organizers say the event will be bigger and better.<\/p>\n
“I say every year, all the time, Juneteenth is American history,” Lauren Cobbs, founder of SD Melanin, said.<\/p>\n
First celebrated in 1865, Juneteenth has grown into a nationwide commemoration of Black history and culture. For Cobbs, the day carries deep meaning.<\/p>\n
“It’s this beautiful celebration of freedom and resilience,” Cobbs said.<\/p>\n
The annual Kim Folk Fest draws hundreds of people for food and live music, and organizers say it serves a larger purpose for the San Diego community.<\/p>\n
“It’s Juneteenth specifically, Kim Folk Fest is bringing together the community in San Diego that sometimes feels splintered,” Love Lee, event curator for SD Melanin, said.<\/p>\n
This year, SD Melanin is expanding beyond a single-day festival to a full week of events, including entrepreneur workshops and R&B kickoff events. The goal is to help small businesses connect with new and returning customers.<\/p>\n
“I think the first thing is we’re expanding on Kim Folk Fest weekend from last year to it being more of a week this year,” Cobbs said.<\/p>\n
The expanded festival will feature close to 100 Black-owned small businesses, along with new artists, DJ sets and art installations.<\/p>\n
“So we have almost 100 small black businesses, which is a pretty amazing, um, we also have new artists, new DJ sets new art installations,” Cobbs said.<\/p>\n
As the festival continues to double in size each year, organizers say the spirit behind it should extend well beyond one weekend.<\/p>\n
“Every year we need something like Kim Folk Fest every month, OK, because the only way that we are going to progress forward is together,” Cobbs said.<\/p>\n
This story was reported on-air by a journalist and has been converted to this platform with the assistance of AI. Our editorial team verifies all reporting on all platforms for fairness and accuracy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Juneteenth, celebrated on June 19, marks the day enslaved African Americans in Galveston, Texas, were finally told they…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":363713,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[32957,74,76,147718,75,147719,13532],"class_list":["post-363712","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-diego","tag-juneteenth","tag-san-diego","tag-san-diego-headlines","tag-san-diego-juneteenth","tag-san-diego-news","tag-sd-melanin","tag-waterfront-park"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363712","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=363712"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363712\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/363713"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=363712"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=363712"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=363712"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}