On a trip to Phoenix sometime in the 1980s, Lydia Morgan and her husband came across a small outdoor celebration called Juneteenth that struck a chord with her.
“It was the cutest, tiniest, little festival celebrating the end of slavery,” she said.
There wasn’t more than a couple of hundred of people there, she recalled, but it resonated because she remembered asking her mother while growing up why there wasn’t some sort of commemoration of such a historically significant event.
