Local communities to celebrate Juneteenth with art, block party View Comments Ventura County organizations are preparing art walks and other festivities next weekend to celebrate Juneteenth, the annual June 19 commemoration of the end of slavery in the United States. "A lot of people don’t realize Black people were not emancipated on the Fourth of July," said La Shaun Aaron, co-founder of 805 Resistance which is co-hosting a Juneteenth block party Saturday in Thousand Oaks. "That’s not our day of freedom." The event celebrates June 19, 1865, the day Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas to inform enslaved African-Americans of their freedom — two and a half years after President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation took effect.