Crossposted from the DES Express

For the first time ever, King County raised a Pan-African Flag over the Administration Plaza as part of a celebration of Juneteenth – Freedom Day. After a few brief speeches, participants broke into song at the event on June 18, singing the Black National Anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” a hymn written as a poem by NAACP leader James Weldon Johnson in 1900.

The flag waved proudly over the Plaza through June 19 to commemorate the first Juneteenth celebrations that took place in 1866, a year after Union troops arrived in Galveston Bay, Texas, to share the news of the Emancipation Proclamation following the Civil War. The Proclamation declared that “all persons held as slaves” in states that had seceded from the Union “are, and henceforth shall be free.” The Emancipation Proclamation itself was signed on January 1, 1863, more than two and a half years prior. News of the Proclamation had been kept from people who were enslaved.

Juneteenth was made a federal holiday in 2021, and has been an official holiday for King County employees since 2022. Watch a brief summary of the event here, and watch the entire flag raising here.