When Was the First Juneteenth Celebration in Los Angeles? – LAmag

Public events started in 1975, but the NAACP marked it a decade earlier

Pacoima was the first place the city celebrated Juneteenth in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Times reported that the City of Los Angeles Parks and Recreation Department held its third annual observance at the Pacoima Recreation Center in 1977. A celebration in 1975 would have been a full five years before the state of Texas became the first to make Juneteenth a government holiday. That drive to make it a national holiday kept rolling for decades, until an official designation was declared under President Joe Biden, who designated June 19 an official federal holiday in 2021, following a year of racial justice protests that rocked the nation.

Today, libraries, city halls, banks, post offices and the stock market are closed to mark the federal holiday commemorating the end of slavery in 1865. Two and a half years had passed since Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, but many enslaved people were unaware of the news. The Library of Congress describes it as carrying additional meaning as a “symbolic date” representing the African American struggle for freedom and equality, and a celebration of family and community.

Although it is the first time an official city “Juneteenth” is mentioned in the Los Angeles Times, that first celebration in Pacoima occurred nearly a decade after the NAACP held a gala ball at the Knollwood Country Club in Granada Hills “celebrating the traditional Freedom Day for Texas and Oklahoma Negros,” as they put it at the time. In a black and white photo from June 18, 1964, we see Mrs. Edward Melfort, co-chairman of the affair; Dr. Vernon Collins, M.D., toastmaster; Mrs. Theodore Larkin of the Valley Fair Housing Council, and Mrs. A. L. Calvin of the NAACP Women’s Auxiliary inspecting a bell from the 19th century, originally cast at a slave-operated foundry in Kentucky. Even earlier than that, the Los Angeles Sentinel reported that a Texas ex-pat named Jonathan Leonard hosted a backyard barbecue marking the holiday with family and friends on this day in 1949. He became a Los Angeles city fireman and lobbied for recognition of the holiday. Fifty years after that party, he was honored when the California State Legislature finally listened to him and declared a permanent day of recognition in 1999.