Milwaukee's Juneteenth: The Nation's Oldest Annual Celebration
Near Milwaukee, Wisconsin
On June nineteenth, eighteen sixty-five, a Union general named Gordon Granger rode into Galveston, Texas, and read General Order Number Three, informing enslaved people in Texas that they were free. The Emancipation Proclamation had been in effect for two and a half years. The Confederacy had delayed. The announcement came last to the state that was furthest from the war's center.
The day became Juneteenth, and Black communities across the country marked it with gatherings, prayer, food, and music. The celebration was always local, always community-rooted, and always vulnerable to suppression and neglect.
Milwaukee's Juneteenth celebration began in nineteen seventy-one, organized by the city's civil rights community in the aftermath of the open-housing marches and the urban renewal destruction of Bronzeville. The organizers were determined to build something that lasted. More than fifty years later, it has. The Milwaukee Juneteenth celebration is recognized as the oldest continuously operating annual Juneteenth celebration in the United States.
The celebration now stretches across several blocks of Martin Luther King Jr. Drive in the Bronzeville corridor, drawing more than one hundred seventy thousand participants each year. It is a community event that has outlasted the conditions that created it, which is a remarkable thing for any community institution to do.
When Congress finally declared Juneteenth a federal holiday in twenty twenty-one, Milwaukee had been marking the day for fifty years. The federal government caught up.
