Santa Barbara was feeling the love on Friday at Plaza del Mar during the annual Juneteenth celebration, marked this year with a “Love for the People” theme.

Friday’s event was the ninth Santa Barbara Juneteenth event hosted by Juneteenth Santa Barbara.

“With everything going on in the world, nationally and even locally, there’s a heaviness, and we always need some break,” said Jordan Killebrew, Juneteenth Santa Barbara co-founder. “… The emotion of love and what love means in this community just felt important.”

Juneteenth, celebrated nationally, commemorates the day Union troops arrived in Texas and announced that more than 250,000 enslaved Black people in the state were free, according to the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

The announcement came more than two years after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. 

Santa Barbara’s free and daylong gathering at 100 Castillo St. featured live music, food trucks, vendors, a Black Artisan Market and tabling by local Black-led community organizations.  

Killebrew said he hoped the celebration served as not just a fun community event, but also a lesson.

“For those that may not know what Juneteenth is, I hope they can see that there is a Black community here that is thriving and exists,” Killebrew said.

For Juneteenth Santa Barbara co-founder Simone Akila Ruskamp, the heart of each year’s theme remains the same: celebrating Black communities.

“I’m about Juneteenth being about Black people being visibly Black, especially in a city that has historically always pushed Black people out,” she said.

Ruskamp is also the co-founder of Healing Justice Santa Barbara. She wrote a children’s book about local Black history, which she had on display Friday for attendees passing by the organization’s table.  

Like Killebrew, one of her favorite things about the event is seeing community members participate.

“I love seeing so many Black people in one space, showing each other who we belong to and that we are holding this for each other,” Ruskamp said.

The gathering even drew non-Santa Barbara residents. San Francisco resident and first-time attendee Jody Stiger hopped on an Amtrak train with 30 of his family members from Los Angeles to come to the Friday celebration. 

“It’s welcoming, it is inviting. … It’s family-friendly, and the vendors are cool,” Stiger said.

He said his aunt found the gathering just by searching for nearby events, and they settled on the Santa Barbara celebration.

“We wanted to just be out and support vendors,” he said.  

Lelia Richardson, Umoja Program adviser at Santa Barbara City College, and Nolan Hicks, member of the Juneteenth planning committee, led a ceremony at the Plaza Del Mar Band Shell to honor ancestors following a West African Practice.

“This is our legacy, this is our heritage,” Richardson said. 

She and Hicks stood on stage with a plant and invited the crowd to think about two of their ancestors they’d like to honor. They then watered the plant as people shouted out names of family members and prominent Black leaders such as Rosa Parks and Harriet Tubman.

“This plant will continue to grow and hold that memory and hold that space,” Richardson said.

Celebrations continued into the evening with the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara’s second annual performance featuring Emmy-winning choreographer, director and movement artist Jon Boogz.

Elevate Gallery in La Cumbre Plaza held an evening Juneteenth screening and live performance event hosted by Rod Rolle, which included special footage of Santa Barbara Poet Laureate Sojourner Kincaid Rolle and artist Toni Scott’s “Bloodlines” exhibit. 

Santa Barbara wasn’t the only community celebrating Juneteenth on Friday. In Lompoc, several North County organizations partnered up to host a Juneteenth event at Old Town that ran from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

The ’90s Babiez headlined, with guest speaker Elliot Davis, for a day filled with cultural performances, food and marketplace vendors, kids’ activities and community resources. 

Lawanda Lyons-Pruitt, president of the NAACP Santa Maria-Lompoc Branch, said the area “must work to share the historical and current achievements of our Black community.” 

“With federal agencies not acknowledging Black History Month and other significant cultural holidays, we stand firm that in Santa Barbara County, we still celebrate, acknowledge and respect our diversity, which only strengthens us,” she said in a press release about the Lompoc gathering.