READING, Pa. — Reading commemorated Juneteenth with a flag raising ceremony in City Park.<\/p>\n
The federal holiday marks the day back in 1865 when federal troops arrived in Texas to ensure all enslaved people were set free.<\/p>\n
It came more than two-years after President Lincoln signed the emancipation proclamation.<\/p>\n
Friday’s ceremony retold that history and showcased the progress happening everyday.<\/p>\n
“There was a decree with the city that they had to hire more police and fire persons of color. The police, it was great, they were hiring people like crazy. Fire, it took a while. When I saw the mayor in the newspaper, the picture of him with Chief Leonard, I don’t have the words for what it meant to me,” said Wynton Butler, president of the NAACP Berks Chapter.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Reading will light City Hall and the Pagoda in Red, Green, and Yellow all weekend long.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"READING, Pa. — Reading commemorated Juneteenth with a flag raising ceremony in City Park. The federal holiday marks…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":223484,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[214,128,130,129,213],"class_list":["post-223483","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-reading","tag-_homepage_top_stories","tag-reading-city","tag-reading-city-headlines","tag-reading-city-news","tag-reading-area"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223483","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=223483"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223483\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/223484"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=223483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=223483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=223483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}