Juneteenth Celebration Draws Crowd To Brookline

BROOKLINE, MA — About 100 people marched down the sidewalk and spilled into Harvard Street as they marched from the newly named Florida Ruffin Ridley School to Brookline park Saturday to celebrate Juneteenth.

It was the second time the town has marked the day. Last year several hundred people showed up to mark the day with a rally outside the police station. The holiday, which stretches back to 1865, has taken on a new meaning in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd by a Minnesota police officer.

This year, the march had a different tone. Lead by Donnelle O'Neal and a group of community leaders from Brookline, there were only a handful of signs. The Brookline Community Foundation and the Town helped sponsor Brookline's first official annual Juneteenth celebration.

The crowd, of mostly white people walked a mile-and-a-half to the Brookline Avenue Park, where there was music, dancing, kids games, and food until 8 p.m.

"The delay of freedom, the delay of equality is what I want everyone to focus on," said O'Neal to those gathered at the park. "Here in Brookline, we say we're progressive, and we give everyone a fair share. But honestly, that has not been the case here. So moving forward with everyone united as they are we need to show equity for everybody. No more delays."

Juneteenth celebrates the end of slavery, and marks the day Union troops arrived in Texas on June 19, 1865 to let people know that slavery in Texas and in the other states of the original Confederacy had ended more than two years before with the Emancipation Proclamation.

Even so, slavery did not end on that day. Enslaved people in Native American territories and Delaware and Kentucky had to wait another year for freedom. And despite the legal end of slavery, white Southerners scrambled to put into place “Black Codes,” that restricted Black people's freedom for decades.