Public events started in 1975, but the NAACP marked it a decade earlier<\/p>\n
Pacoima was the first place the city celebrated Juneteenth<\/a> in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Times reported that the City of Los Angeles Parks and Recreation Department held its third annual observance at the Pacoima Recreation Center in 1977. A celebration in 1975 would have been a full five years before the state of Texas became the first to make Juneteenth a government holiday. That drive to make it a national holiday kept rolling for decades, until an official designation was declared under President Joe Biden, who designated June 19 an official federal holiday in 2021, following a year of racial justice protests that rocked the nation.<\/p>\n Today, libraries, city halls, banks, post offices and the stock market are closed to mark the federal holiday commemorating the end of slavery in 1865. Two and a half years had passed since Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, but many enslaved people were unaware of the news. The Library of Congress<\/a> describes it as carrying additional meaning as a \u201csymbolic date\u201d representing the African American struggle for freedom and equality, and a celebration of family and community.<\/p>\n Although it is the first time an official city \u201cJuneteenth\u201d is mentioned in the Los Angeles Times, that first celebration in Pacoima occurred nearly a decade after the NAACP held a gala ball at the Knollwood Country Club in Granada Hills \u201ccelebrating the traditional Freedom Day for Texas and Oklahoma Negros,\u201d as they put it at the time. In a black and white photo from June 18, 1964, we see Mrs. Edward Melfort, co-chairman of the affair; Dr. Vernon Collins, M.D., toastmaster; Mrs. Theodore Larkin of the Valley Fair Housing Council, and Mrs. A. L. Calvin of the NAACP Women\u2019s Auxiliary inspecting a bell from the 19th century, originally cast at a slave-operated foundry in Kentucky. Even earlier than that, the Los Angeles Sentinel<\/a> reported that a Texas ex-pat named Jonathan Leonard hosted a backyard barbecue marking the holiday with family and friends on this day in 1949. He became a Los Angeles city fireman and lobbied for recognition of the holiday. Fifty years after that party, he was honored when the California State Legislature finally listened to him and declared a permanent day of recognition in 1999.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Public events started in 1975, but the NAACP marked it a decade earlier Pacoima was the first place…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":367584,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[116735,32957,149067,48,52,51,47,50,49,52335,12645,2301,3750],"class_list":["post-367583","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-abraham-lincoln","tag-juneteenth","tag-l-a-county-department-of-parks-and-recreation","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-naacp","tag-pacoima","tag-president-biden","tag-slavery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367583","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=367583"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367583\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/367584"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=367583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=367583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=367583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}