How Denver’s Juneteenth Music Festival grew into one of the nation’s biggest celebrations

Last year, it seemed that Denver’s annual Juneteenth Music Festival might not happen. Early in 2025, the festival announced it needed community support to ensure its existence; several corporate sponsors had dropped out, and the event had already scaled back from two days to one.

So there was a major communal sigh of relief when The Drop 104.7 swept in as a co-presenter, bringing headliner Juvenile along with it. “I can sincerely say that it would not have happened without the support of The Drop 104.7,” says Norman Harris III, who heads the nonprofit that runs the festival, JMF Corporation.

The radio station — one of the region’s best — signed on again this year, and the festival will be bigger than ever. Three days of music and entertainment along Welton Street kick off on Fri., June 19, with a Southern Soul Plaza Party at the Five Points Plaza (this is the only ticketed event of the weekend). It will be followed on Sat., June 20, by the annual parade that leaves Manual High School at 11 a.m. and heads to The Point, at Welton and 26th streets, for a day and night of performances, vendors, food trucks and more along Welton, with two-time Grammy nominee Sir headlining. And the music keeps going through Sun., June 20, with the Juneteenth Hop, a venue crawl around Five Points, which earned a reputation as the “Harlem of the West” for its support of Black musicians a century ago.

“Five Points has been the home of the Denver Juneteenth celebration for generations, even though this is the 15th year of being a festival,” says Harris. “It was one of those things where, just right around early June, you knew it was about time, and there would be this general level of excitement of people gathering in Five Points for the celebration.”

Carrying on a legacy

Harris is a fifth-generation Coloradan, and grew up celebrating Juneteenth in Denver. He remembers week-long festivities, breakdancing with his friends and catching the parade. “It felt like a huge family reunion for folks in northeast Denver to really kind of all come back to Five Points,” he says. “It was just a really magical celebration for people. I just smile when I reminisce on those experiences.”

Now, he’s the executive director of the Five Points Business Improvement District, and has been running the annual Juneteenth Music Festival throughout its 15-year run.

“I was born and raised in northeast Denver,” he says, “and I’ve got deep roots here in the Five Points community.” After graduating from Colorado State University and working in finance for the next ten years, “I found myself with the itch to try to really raise the trajectory of the Juneteenth celebration that was happening,” he adds.

“It was such a big part of my childhood, but then it really had some challenges,” he notes, citing gang and gun violence in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Gentrification also led to a decline in attendance, and in 2006, the Five Points Business Association was forced to cancel the parade for the first time in 40 years. The event went through more reorganization, and Harris and his friends wanted to help out.

“We bugged the organizers for a couple of years about getting more involved, and then on Feb. 12, 2012, I got a forwarded email from the prior organizer, and she was forwarding an email from one of the radio stations, and just said, ‘Norman is your main point of contact for Juneteenth,'” he recalls, “and that’s how it happened.”

JMF Corporation gets going

The first step was forming a nonprofit to run the event, and then renaming it. “Our concept was a transformation from it being called just Juneteenth to it being Juneteenth Music Festival,” Harris says, “and really centering music as the anchor for why people would want to come back.”

They booked the funk band Ohio Players for the 2012 event, which saw hundreds of vendors and got the festival “back on track,” Harris says. “It didn’t have nearly the attendance that we have today, but it really put it on a new trajectory.”

Today, the festival is made possible by donations, vendor fees, alcohol sales and sponsorships; it’s not a city-funded event, as some people believe. If you can’t attend, Harris says the best ways to support the event are to donate to the nonprofit or just spread the word, to help make it more attractive for grants.

“There are hundreds of small businesses and community organizations that are able to connect with people in one of the most dynamic atmospheres you’ll ever find,” he says. “We’re creating that space for connection, being an anchor for people who’ve been displaced from the neighborhood, who come to Five Points once a year, and that’s for Juneteenth.”

A Juneteenth to remember

The festival now brings upwards of 30,000 people together throughout the weekend, according to Harris, which further underscores the communal importance of Juneteenth. Its celebrations in Denver go back generations; in the 1950s, a Five Points businessman named Otha P. Rice, who moved here from Texas, was the first to begin “celebrating Juneteenth on Welton in a formal sense,” historian Terry Gentry told us for a profile on Denver’s history with Juneteenth. “A lot of people were already marking the day amongst themselves – families getting together for a barbecue, that sort of thing – but he made it an event that took place at the Tap House,” at 2801 Welton Street.

Now, the Denver event is one of the largest in the U.S., and being part of it is a major impetus for why Harris does what he does. “You’re literally writing a legacy and creating opportunities for so many people,” he says. “There’s a real sense of accomplishment, a collective accomplishment, from our team to be able to say that we operate one of the largest and most dynamic Juneteenth celebrations in the country.”