Elgin Juneteenth News Today

Elgins 38th annual prayer breakfast honoring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. resumed in person this year at Elgin Community College.

Festival season begins in the suburbs and people come together in The Week in Pictures photo gallery for June 13-19, 2022.

Suburbanites will mark the year-old federal and state holiday of Juneteenth with a weekend of festivals, parades, flag raisings and other celebrations. But the holiday observed on June 19 means so much more, leaders say.

The festival season feels like its really getting back to normal with the return of Napervilles Ribfest, Taste of Des Plaines, Blues on the Fox in Aurora, Swedish Days in Geneva and the many concerts in the park, art fairs and cruise nights.

Elgins Juneteenth Festival will be held Saturday and Sunday, June 18 and 19, at Festival Park. Juneteenth, also known as Freedom Day, marks the day when federal troops arrived in Galveston, Texas in 1865 to take control of the state and to proclaim and ensure all enslaved people were freed. The troops arrival came 2½ years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation which ended slavery. It was made a federal holiday in 2021.