Even though June 19 is not an “official” holiday, it is going to feel like one when that date rolls around and the annual Rockdale Juneteenth celebration comes to town.
The parade will start at 4 p.m. on June 19. Participants will line up beginning at the corner of Burleson and Cameron.
There will be classic cars, wagons, riders on horses, dance groups and go-carts in the parade that will proceed down Cameron, then take a right onto San Gabriel. It will then go over the railroad tracks onto Plum and head down to a left turn on Third Street with a quick right onto MLK. The next turn is a left onto Fifth Street, then a right onto Baxter and into Moultry Park behind the Aycock Center.
At the park there will be vendors selling all kinds of things with food, clothes and jewelry among the items being sold.
The crowd will be entertained by a deejay and the event speaker will be Gordon McKee who was a graduate of Rockdale High School in 1985.
Donald Ray and Mary Allen will serve as the grand marshals for the parade which celebrates the day that Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation reached the shores of Texas in Galveston.
The proclamation had been issued in September of 1862. But the word of the freedom of slaves didn’t get to Texas until after the end of Civil War.
June 19, 1865, was when Gordon Granger, a Union general, stood at the corner of Strand and 22nd Street and read, “That on the first day of January. A.D. 1863, all persons held as slaves within any state…in rebellion against the U.S. shall be then, thenceforward and forever free.”
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