Exa McClain and Marie Mitchell strolled side by side on the Les Gove Park grass Sunday afternoon, cradling bouquets of beautiful, fragrant flowers they had just bought from one of the many vendors at the city of Auburn’s Juneteenth celebration.

Smiling, laughing, having a good time, officially commemorating the day Black people in Texas got the word from a Union officer that they were “henceforth and forever free,” two years after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation that said so.

But the national holiday is also a celebration of unity and the history of America, and how people of varied races got together and made this nation what it is.

“This is how it should be,” Mitchell said, looking around at the hundreds of attendees. “It’s all of us, not just a particular race of people, getting together. Celebrations of any race should bring people together. At Cinco de Mayo, you see all races together. That’s unity, and that’s why should celebrate every day as unity.”

“Any time we have a celebration,” added Exa, “if it’s a parade or a festival, look at how people get together and celebrate together. Every day should be a celebration. If everybody would wake up and see each day as a celebration, maybe we wouldn’t have as much crime on the streets.”

Auburn’s Keisha Taylor grew up in North Carolina among a throng of loving relatives — aunts, great aunts, grandparents and great-grandparents — who had lived during Jim Crow segregation and had seen and suffered the worst parts.

“They told me a lot about the specific history of what it is to be Black in America,” she said. “And now that Juneteenth is a federally recognized holiday, it’s nice to have something to celebrate beside July 4 and Christmas …something for me.”

Michael, a veteran of many Juneteenth celebrations in Seattle, Tacoma, and now Auburn, offered his take: “In my eyes, Juneteenth is not just one day out of the year, it’s every day. Because, as Black people, we’re striving for perfection, to show everybody that we’re capable of doing just as much, if not more, if we’re given the opportunities.”

He said Black people seldom got the recognition they had earned and deserved for their inventions, including peanut butter, their advances in medicine, the sciences and music, such as inventing jazz and rock n’ roll.

“In my life, this day shows we deserve some of the same equity, equality and some of the financial stability that everybody else has had,” he said. “Most people have migrated here. We were brought here for labor, but it was all free labor for almost 300 years, and not by choice.”

Under the banner of Big Dawg’s Hot Dogs, vendor Dominic’que Davison sported a T-shirt commemorating the day Black people realized they were free from bondage.

“My ancestors, the people who sacrificed and risked it all to provide freedom for us, it was all for something. And I will never allow their memories and the efforts they put in and the sacrifices they made to die,” he said. “Today is not necessarily the date of Juneteenth, which is on June 19, but June 21 is the day of Juneteenth that Auburn, Washington, has chosen to celebrate it. And it was a privilege and an honor to be selected to come out here and celebrate. In our culture, the way we usually celebrate is food, to show love through food. That’s another reason why it’s called soul food because all we had was scraps of food the slave masters didn’t want to eat. We found the way to create food that was very good for us and tasted good.”

He continued: “It’s up to us to represent as a culture and as a people, and know in totality that what we do is worth respecting. We are more than just basketball players, more than just throwing a football, more than just tennis, we’re more than just dancers, we’re more than just comedians. We are a people, through and through.”