The Peoria NAACP will again celebrate Juneteenth with the 3rd annual Ernestine Jackson Freedom Day Parade on Saturday, June 13, in Downtown Peoria. The parade will feature more than 70 units and be led by Grand Marshall Andre W. Allen, a Peoria City Council member, and family.
The parade commemorates the ancestral legacy of Juneteenth and celebrates with expressions of jubilee. The parade is held in honor of the late Ernestine Jackson, a trailblazer for civil rights in Peoria and the first director of fair employment and housing in Peoria.
Pastor Marvin Hightower, the NAACP Peoria branch president, said Jackson was a trailblazer for civil rights.
"She came up through the ranks. She is a perfect example of a community servant," Hightower said.
Due to construction on MacArthur Highway, the parade will move to downtown Peoria this year. Hightower said the starting point will be near the Peoria Civic Center parking lot on Monroe, with the parade set to begin at 1p.m.
"The route will leave that lot and then head down Main Street past a reviewing stand across from the Courthouse," he said.
The parade, which Hightower says has become a tradition, is just one of several events in the coming weeks. Others include the Miss and Mister Juneteenth Pageant, a self-driving historical tour at Springdale Cemetery, several park district events and the Yani Collective's Juneteenth Fest.
Juneteenth commemorates the end of slavery in the United States, some two years after the Emancipation Proclamation, when Union Major General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, and informed the 250,000 enslaved people in the state that they were free.
Celebrated throughout various states over the years since, it was formally established as a federal holiday in 2021.
