In Los Angeles, the end of slavery was often marked on New Year's Day, before new arrivals from Texas brought the tradition of a Juneteenth party.
, the city’s first Black house of worship. The reason: the ratification of the 15th Amendment, which gave African American citizens the right to vote. There was a potluck with speeches and a dance where whites were invited. Later on that night, ecstatic parishioners took the party in Bunker HillFour days later, one of those party-goers, a barber named Lewis G. Green, tried to register to vote.
Over three services that day, reported the Los Angeles Times, the Wesley Chapel congregation heard from people like “Mr. Morton,” who talked about how “he was a poor slave boy with not even an education to aid him, but he has been able to accumulate considerable property and live a happy life.” Another former slave, one Mr. Sawyer, told the audience he was there when the first Juneteenth happened “and praised God for freedom.
Juneteenth didn’t warrant any further comment from Sawyer, because it was still relatively unknown to locals; the earliest known celebration is an 1895 picnic at North Beach in Santa Monica attended by over 200. But it soon eclipsed Emancipation Day in popularity after tens of thousands of African Americans from Texas came to Southern California as part of the Great Migration and brought the Lone Star State tradition with them.
It became fixed enough on the Southern California African American imagination that in 1938, the resort town of Val Verde near Santa Clarita, known as thechose June 19 as the date to start a bathhouse and swimming pool project where African Americans could swim and lounge in peace.
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