BY ANITA STIEFEL AND KADIE VICK
THE OBSERVER
LEE COUNTY — There will be several events to commemorate Juneteenth this year, starting with Auburn’s third annual celebration and a family fun day in Opelika this weekend, as well as Opelika’s Juneteenth on the Square next weekend.
Auburn’s Juneteenth Parade is set for Friday, June 14, at 6 p.m. The parade will begin at Boykin Center and end at Drake Middle School. This is a free, family-friendly event.
Auburn will celebrate Juneteenth on Saturday, June 15, beginning at 10 a.m. in Keisel Park, with a ceremony at noon. Auburn’s events are sponsored by Councilwoman Connie Fitch Taylor and the Northwest Auburn Taskforce Inc.
The Lion Tamers Social and Civic Club will host a Junteenth Family Fun Day on Saturday, June 15, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Covington Recreation Center, located at 213 Carver Ave. in Opelika. This year’s theme is Stop the Violence, Save Our Children.
Opelika’s Juneteenth on the Square celebration will be held Friday, June 21, at 5:30 p.m. at Lee County Courthouse Square. The event will include food, activities and entertainment for the community to enjoy.
“We’ll have our vendors, we have the food trucks, there’ll be live entertainment and this year we have incorporated the Juneteenth choir that will perform as well,” said Opelika Juneteenth Committee member Janataka Hughley-Holmes. “It’s just a time for us to come together as one, not one race, but as one body and in unity to commemorate the holidays.”
Committee members hope to emphasize the importance of Juneteenth and ensure the holiday is treated with the celebration it deserves.
“We continue not to allow it [Juneteenth] to be watered down from generation to generation, and we continue to enlighten our children so that they’ll now know what it is,” Hughley-Holmes said. “For generations to come, we just want it to continue to be passed down because that’s part of our history.
“We don’t want this holiday to ever die down, because this is truly a significant milestone and landmark for many who were not free,” she said. “America was free at that time, but there were so many who were enslaved that were not free. So, we continue to highlight and allow it to be this momentous occasion that we continue to embrace, we continue to share the history, and we were able to be a voice with a peaceful but powerful voice,” she said.
Officially known as Juneteenth National Independence Day, Juneteenth was signed into law as a federal holiday in the U.S. by President Joe Biden in 2021. The holiday is celebrated annually on June 19 to commemorate the end of slavery. The holiday’s name combines “June” and “nineteenth, as it was on June 19, 1865, when the Emancipation Proclamation started being enforced in the last slavery holdout, Texas.
Opelika’s Juneteenth on the Square began in 2020, in the wake of the George Floyd suffocation death at the hands of Minnesota police.
“We had a lot of people in the city who were unhappy about the way that things transpired,” Hughley-Holmes said. “We’re not going to be that city that riots and continues to have conflict with our law enforcement officers. We’re going to see how we can peacefully do this, as well as invite our law enforcement officers to the table so that we can all come together, and we’ll state our point of view from where we’re seeing things, but work with law enforcement agency to make sure that this does not happen in our city, and to kind of stand up so that we would know that this is unacceptable to happen.”