Juneteenth

Tomorrow is Juneteenth all over. Celebrate freedom. Have a happy.

Tomorrow morning, Joe Kings of Portland, Me., will be up at dawn to get the fire going. Every year on the third Saturday in June, Mr. Kings's barbecued ribs, corn and spicy red beans draw hundreds of Maine residents — most of them white — to his celebration of a Texas holiday once celebrated only by blacks: Juneteenth.

With events including a small rap contest in Anchorage and a huge festival of African-American heritage in Baltimore, hundreds of thousands of Americans will celebrate Juneteenth, the day slavery in the United States effectively ended. With the arrival of an Army ship in Galveston on June 19, 1865, Texas was the last state to learn that the South had surrendered two months earlier. More than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect on Jan. 1, 1863, the 250,000 slaves in Texas were finally freed....

...."You'd think the end of slavery would be a holiday for all Americans," said Wade Woods, a member of the committee for Juneteenth in San Francisco, often cited as the oldest civic celebration outside the Southwest; Texas' neighboring states also have extensive celebrations. In the 1950's, Mr. Woods said, a transplanted Texan named Wesley Johnson put Juneteenth on the map there by annually donning a ten-gallon hat and riding a white horse down Fillmore Street - then the main drag of the black neighborhood.

This year, San Francisco's 54th Juneteenth event, which includes a posse of black cowboys, is expected to draw about 50,000 spectators.

Juneteenth has been a state holiday in Texas since 1980, and the political issues it raised then are now on the national stage. Some Texas lawmakers objected to the holiday as a glorification of black ignorance; others claimed there were already occasions enough on the calendar to recognize the African-American experience, including Emancipation Day, celebrated on Jan. 1, the day Lincoln's proclamation went into effect.

And with Martin Luther King's Birthday established as an official forum for discussions of race, some still question the need for "another" black holiday, Mr. Herring said.

"But this is our day to be happy," he said. "I'm glad as hell that the U.S. got its freedom on July Fourth, but were my ancestors free that day? I don't think so."