India Johnson shares what Juneteenth means to her

India Johnson Washington is an Indianapolis influencer who shared what the holiday of Juneteenth means to her. She said it is a celebration of being able to choose your own journey.

Juneteenth commemorates the emancipation of enslaved African Americans in the United States. On June 19, 1865, Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas, and delivered the news of the Emancipation Proclamation and effectively ending slavery in the last Confederate state.

“They went through slavery, they went through Jim Crow, they went through the Civil Rights Movement, and whether they were activists or not they lived and persisted through it,” she says. “I have no choice but to live and persist through everything that I’m going through, because they did it, and otherwise I would not be here.”