This week, Forest Park, along with the rest of the county, celebrates Juneteenth. The June 19 federal holiday recognizes the day in 1865 when Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas and freed a quarter-million slaves two years after the 13th Amendment abolished slavery.
Forest Park Mayor Rory Hoskins grew up in Galveston and was no stranger to Juneteenth celebrations as a child. But when he moved to Forest Park, fewer people in the area had heard of Juneteenth – until Hoskins became the village’s first Black public official.
“Being a commissioner in Forest Park gave me a platform, and we had a growing Black population,” Hoskins said. “I looked around and we had German Fest and Saint Patrick’s Day, so why not start an event for the African American community?”
So, Hoskins and a group of volunteers came together to create the annual Juneteenth Pool Party at the Park District of Forest Park.
“In 2009, most people in the Proviso area had never heard of Juneteenth,” Hoskins said during his speech at Forest Park’s Juneteenth flag raising on June 2.
Then, Hoskins said he saw that the holiday was most recognized by a certain age group of people in the Chicagoland area.
“You have to remember that a lot of Black people in Chicago have roots in the South. What I found is that older Black people knew what it was, and a lot of young people didn’t,” Hoskins said.
So public officials and volunteers set out to educate the younger generation, working with District 91 teachers and staff to spread the word about the inaugural Juneteenth pool party – an event chosen because public pools and beaches were one of the last places to be integrated.
This year’s pool party continues Hoskins’ goal to inform locals about the United States’ history with slavery – and about people who still experience it in other countries.
At the pool party, the nonprofit Abolition Institute gave law student Madeeha Syed its 2025 Aichana Abeid Boilil Award for anti-slavery advocacy. The award is named after a woman who was rescued from slavery in Mauritania by Abolition Institute’s partner organization, SOS Esclaves.
Mauritania is a country in northwestern Africa where modern slavery is still widespread. Though, in 2007, Mauritania was the last country to criminalize slavery, slave owners still exist there and are rarely punished.
Syed – a graduate of Benedictine University in Lisle and current student at Wayne State University Law School in Detroit, Michigan – wrote a research paper on slavery in Mauritania after visiting the country to meet victims of slavery, government officials and activists.
Previous Aichana Abeid Boilil Award winners include Illinois State Representative La Shawn Ford, Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky and Hoskins – who traveled to Mauritania with the Abolition Institute in 2021 and 2023.
“When I was in Mauritania, I promised some of the people that we met that we would use our Juneteenth tradition to help people understand what’s happening on their end of the planet,” Hoskins said. “There’s still a lot of discriminatory practices there that parallel what we saw in the United States between 1865 and the 1960s.” He added, “They take some inspiration from what’s unfolded here.”
Growing up in Galveston
In the 1970s and early ‘80s, Hoskins recalls celebrating Juneteenth in Galveston by getting together with his family for a large community picnic. It was hosted by Local 851 of the International Longshoremen’s Association, the largest union of maritime workers in the country, which Hoskins’ grandfather was a part of.
Though Hoskins recalls locals also putting on beauty pageants and gospel concerts during Juneteenth, he only understood the holiday from the perception as a child.
“I just knew I was at something with family and friends from the community,” he said.
After Juneteenth became a holiday in Texas in 1980 – the first state to recognize it as such – Hoskins remembers how it was observed while he was attending the University of Texas at Austin. He said there weren’t large celebrations, but the state capital closed for the day. And Hoskins remembers, during that time, people recognizing Juneteenth in other southern states like Arkansas, Louisiana and Oklahoma. Nearing the turn of the century, Juneteenth started spreading north.
“People from the South took their tradition to other states,” Hoskins said. He was among them.
In 1994, when he was in his twenties, Hoskins moved to Chicago. Though he said he heard mention of Juneteenth on radio stations – and recalls a local organization or two hosting events to celebrate – “it wasn’t really widely observed,” he said.
That all changed by the time Juneteenth became a national holiday in 2021.
Though Hoskins has helped to host a Juneteenth pool party for over a decade – and Forest Park resident and artist Kevin Leonard has made T-shirts and promotional materials for the Juneteenth pool party every year that include an image of the Juneteenth flag – Forest Park’s Juneteenth flag raising is a more recent addition.
“I don’t have a strong connection,” Hoskins said of the Juneteenth flag. “I became aware of it around the time we started doing the tradition here.”
Hoskins said there was a national organization pushing to make Juneteenth a holiday, and two Forest Park residents were a part of it. One of them, Marjorie Adams Clark, was the first person to ask the village to have a flag-raising ceremony for Juneteenth, according to Hoskins.
In addition to the pool party and flag raising, Forest Park even hosted a Juneteenth parade once. In 2022, Hoskins rode a float with other local mayors, starting in Forest Park and ending at Proviso East High School. Brandon Johnson, who was a Cook County commissioner at the time, and Fritz Kaegi, Cook County assessor, also joined the parade.
“It takes a lot of time and energy to coordinate a parade,” Hoskins said of the one-time event. Though, as the Juneteenth tradition grows, Hoskins said he could see the parade coming back to Forest Park in the future.