Photos: The Quad Cities Juneteenth Festival celebrated a long-running local tradition in a new location

The sun was shining on Saturday as people gathered on 2nd Street in downtown Davenport for the Quad Cities’ annual Juneteenth Festival.

The location was different this year — it’s traditionally been held in LeClaire Park, closer to the river — but the celebration was the same as always, with music, dance, speeches, food and a sense of community. Folks from all five Quad Cities gathered on June 20 to commemorate the end of slavery, the accomplishments of Black Americans and the ongoing fight for freedom.

It was on June 19, 1865 in Galveston, Texas that U.S. Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger issued General Order No. 3, formally ending slavery in the state. Neither the Emancipation Proclamation, which took effect on the first day of 1863, nor the collapse of the Confederate government following Robert E. Lee’s surrender in April 1865, had any immediate impact in Texas. An army under one of Lee’s subordinates continued fighting in Texas until the beginning of June.

The anniversary of Granger’s order became an annual celebration among Black Texans, who shortened June 19 to Juneteenth. It eventually became such a part of Texas culture that Juneteenth was recognized as an official state holiday in 1980. It was already being unofficially observed in other states by then, but after that official recognition, Juneteenth celebrations started becoming more common around the country. Still, gaining official recognition as a holiday beyond Texas was a slow process, and it wasn’t until 2021 that Juneteenth became a federal holiday.

Davenport has had an annual Juneteenth celebration since 1989. Friends of MLK, a local nonprofit, has organized it since 2017, and collaborated with TMBC Lincoln Resource Center to stage this year’s event. 

The festival featured live music, including performances by SoulTru and Funky Soul, as well as plenty of food and family friendly games. There were resource booths to provide community information, as well as spoken word performances by members of Young Lions Roar. Members of the NovaRize Dance Company and Roya Drama Dance performed, as did the Marching Avenir Highsteppers, a Rock Island-based drill team for Quad Cities kids ages 9 to 19 that formed last year. 

Miss Iowa 2026, McKenzie Kerry, was one of the featured speakers at the festival and helped judge the Miss Juneteenth pageant, which crowned Nia Kirk as Miss Juneteenth Quad Cities 2026. 

In a social media post after appearing at the festival, Kerry called Juneteenth “a time to gather in community, to honor history and progress, and to make space for joy.”

This year marked 37 years since the first official Quad Cities Juneteenth celebration in Davenport, but the city held celebrations of Black freedom and the end of slavery before Texans celebrated the first anniversary of Juneteenth in 1866. 

On New Year’s Eve in 1865, just six months after the final shots were fired in the Civil War, the city’s Black community threw an “Emancipation Festival.” Annual celebrations of the end of slavery were held regularly in the Quad Cities, typically in January or late summer, for decades afterward. 

Iowa was among the first states to officially recognize Juneteenth, albeit as a day of observance rather than a state holiday. In 2002, an effort led by the Iowa Juneteenth Observance, which has organized an annual celebration in Des Moines since 1990, convinced the legislature to pass a bill declaring the third Saturday in June to be “Juneteenth National Freedom Day.” When Gov. Tom Vilsack signed the bill into law, Iowa became the seventh state to recognize Juneteenth.