ENGELWOOD, N.J.—The Jabari Society of Englewood—a group of professional black firefighters—are organizing Juneteenth Weekend 2019 Festival and Parade at Depot Square in Englewood.
The big weekend of community fun will start on Thursday, June 13 and continue through Sunday, June 16. The parade will be held on Saturday, June 15 at 12:30 p.m. at the monument at Tenafly Road and Palisade Avenue.
Enjoy carnival rides, fun and games on Thursday, June 13 from 5 to 10 p.m.; Friday, June 14, from 5 to 11 p.m.; Saturday, June 15 from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m.; and Sunday, June 16 from 12 to 9 p.m.
Wrist Band Saturday—purchase on June 15 between 1 to 7 p.m.—offers festival goers a chance to ride all day until closing.
Juneteenth confronts the difficult legacy of slavery in America, which the Jabari Society calls a bittersweet “time of celebration, but also reflection, healing and hopefully a time for the country to come together and deal with its slave legacy.”
The society says that a little more than half of U.S. states acknowledge Juneteenth in some form or other. New Jersey celebrates Juneteenth Independence Day thanks to Englewood’s own, late Sen. Bryon Baer’s legislation enacted in 2004.
“There is a common misconception among Americans that Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves with the stroke of his pen. Yet the Emancipation Proclamation, which went into effect on Jan. 1, 1863, did no such thing—or, at least, it didn’t do a very good job of it,” the Jabari Society writes. “Two-and-a-half years later, on June 19, 1865, Union soldiers sailed into Galveston, Texas, announced the end of the Civil War and read aloud a general order freeing the quarter-million slaves residing in the state. It’s likely none of them had any idea that they had actually been freed more than two years before.
“It was truly a day of mass emancipation. It has become known as Juneteenth,” the society writes.
If interested in volunteering for the festival and parade, email jabarisociety@gmail.com.
