Wylie Juneteenth festival honors local leaders, celebrates community pride

Wylie’s seventh annual Juneteenth Festival turned Olde City Park into a daylong gathering of music, fellowship and public recognition, with residents celebrating both the holiday’s history and the people who have helped shape the city’s story. The June 13 event drew families for live entertainment, food vendors, line dancing, spoken-word performances and cultural presentations from K Cooks and Jay Carlos.

The festival also centered on local honors. Roger Smith and Jerri Smith received the Jacoby Stewart Award for their pioneering spirit and service, a recognition that organizers tied to the family’s place among the first Black families to settle in Wylie. Rodney Lewis received the Mr. Wylie Community Impact Award for leadership, event organizing and civic encouragement. Damian Johnson and Tonya Johnson, who lead the Wylie Juneteenth Organization, were presented with the Opal Lee Community Legacy Award for servant leadership and for helping grow the celebration. Debbie Buccino, the city’s emergency management coordinator, received the new Community Champion Award for behind-the-scenes support of community events.

The holiday’s meaning in Texas reaches back to June 19, 1865, when Union troops in Galveston announced freedom for enslaved people there more than two years after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Juneteenth became an official Texas state holiday in 1980 and a federal holiday in 2021. That history has made Juneteenth celebrations in Texas more than festive dates on a calendar, with local organizers using them to connect remembrance, education and civic life.

In Wylie, that work has grown steadily. The Wylie Juneteenth Organization describes itself as a small volunteer committee of local residents working with the City of Wylie to educate and celebrate the history of freedom. The group said the first Wylie Juneteenth event in 2019 drew more than 300 attendees, a benchmark that reflects how the gathering has expanded from a modest community event into a major annual tradition.

Lewis said the festival began as a small gathering seven years ago and has since become part of Wylie’s civic identity. He also said he is stepping away from one leadership role while focusing on voter registration and civic engagement, a shift that links the festival’s remembrance to practical public participation. The connection fits the broader legacy of Opal Lee, the Fort Worth activist known as the Grandmother of Juneteenth, whose 1,400-mile walk to Washington, D.C., helped push national recognition of the holiday. In Wylie, the celebration now stands as both a tribute to Black history and a marker of how a fast-growing city chooses to honor its own.