After spending four years celebrating Juneteenth with events aimed at educating the local community, Black Humboldt is shifting its focus to a broader theme of celebrating the Black experience. “Our very first Juneteenth, we just had to have our Black partners trust us, that this is what Black communities did,” says Monique Harper-Desir, the nonprofit’s co-founder. “[When] we brought [Juneteenth] here, people were like, ‘We don’t know what this is.” Since Black Humboldt’s founding in 2018, the organization has been working to build unity through community events like Juneteenth, and next week it will host the fifth annual festival, holding events and gatherings across Humboldt, including Fortuna, Eureka and Arcata, to commemorate the freeing of slaves. Juneteenth is a national holiday celebrating the day the U.S. fully recognized that freedom, and dates to June 19, 1865, when Union soldiers, led by Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger, arrived in Galveston, Texas, with news that the war had ended and that the enslaved were free. President Abraham Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863, but due to the resistance of slave owners and a resulting delay in spreading the news, many slaves didn’t know they were free until two and a half years later. “I think it really represents how little this country has cared about African people or people descended from Africa that two years could pass,” Harper-Desir says, adding the hope is this year’s festival will continue progress in the face of adversity, noting, “This year’s multicultural event focuses on the theme of ‘visions of a liberated future.'” Having lived in Humboldt for nine years, Harper-Desir, like many Black transplants who relocated to the area, says she found refuge in Humboldt County’s natural beauty and rural quietness — a place the opposite of her previous home in New York City. But she was confronted with the stark reality of the lack of Black representation within the community. According to the U.S. Census, Black people make up less than 2 percent of Humboldt’s population in a county that’s still 82 percent white. (Nationally, Black people make up 14 percent of the population.) The holiday is increasingly important and empowering to Black communities throughout the United States, including those in Humboldt County. Eureka NAACP President Kintay Johnson says it speaks to the local need for a Juneteenth event that it has survived, despite being started during the pandemic. “It brings…