Lawrence Juneteenth celebrates student essay winners at South Park

Joshua Eason and Chelsea Oparaji stood before hundreds gathered in South Park on Friday and gave Lawrence’s Juneteenth celebration a quiet centerpiece: essays written by local high school students. Their readings put Black youth voices at the front of an event that also included music, food and community gathering downtown.

The annual writing contest asked Douglas County high school students, “How has your past strengthened you for your future?” Organizers said they received 15 entries and selected three winners, each receiving $500. Students could submit original essays, poems, songs or raps in entries of 500 to 1,000 words, with the deadline set for Friday, March 6.

That student recognition helped define the opening night of the two-day celebration, which ran Friday from 4:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. and continued Saturday from 8 a.m. through the afternoon at South Park in downtown Lawrence. The event was free and open to the public. Friday’s program also included a free community meal, board games and live performances from B.L.A.C.K. Lawrence artists and local DJs.

Juneteenth marks June 19, 1865, when the last enslaved Black people in Galveston, Texas learned of the Emancipation Proclamation. In Lawrence, the holiday has grown into a broader citywide observance that connects national memory to local Black history, with the student essays offering one of the clearest examples of that connection.

Saturday’s programming expanded the celebration further, with a parade down Massachusetts Street, an Underground Railroad bus tour organized by the Watkins Museum of History, and additional family activities and educational stations. The museum says the tour visits historic sites and tells stories of heroism and tragedy from Lawrence’s early days as an important place in the Underground Railroad and the fight for a free Kansas.

The Lawrence Kansas Juneteenth Organization describes itself as an all-volunteer 501(c)(3) powered entirely by the community, with fundraising that supports the parade, programming and scholarships. This year’s essay contest showed how that mission reaches beyond a festival schedule, giving students a public stage to reflect on freedom, resilience and the history that still shapes families across Lawrence and Douglas County.