Valdosta State University | 1500 North Patterson Street | Valdosta, Georgia | 31698

Sunday, June 5, 2011

Valdosta’s 19th Annual Juneteenth Celebration


For the second year in a row, VSU NAACP will be joining the Valdosta community in a day of remembrance and celebration of Juneteenth on June 18th at 10am at the Pinevale Learning Center. From free food to a Gospelfest, there will be various vendors, organizations, and sponsors from all over in attendance.

On June 19, 1865, the Union General Gordon Granger rode into Galveston, Tex., to inform inhabitants of the Civil War's end two months earlier. Two and a half years after Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, Granger's General Order Number 3 finally freed the last 250,000 slaves whose bondage, due to the minimal Union presence in the region, had been essentially unaffected by Lincoln's efforts. June 19th—which was quickly shortened to "Juneteenth" among celebrants—has become the African-American addendum to our national Independence Day, for, as Juneteenth jubilees remind us, the Emancipation Proclamation did not bring about emancipation, and the prevailing portrayal of Independence Day ignores the ignominious incidence of slavery entirely.

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