By Andrea Shalal
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -President Joe Biden will host the White House's first big Juneteenth celebration, a concert featuring performances by Oscar-winning singer Jennifer Hudson, hip-hop group Wu-Tang Clan's Method Man and marching bands from historically black universities in Tennessee and Maryland.
Vice President Kamala Harris will kick off the South Lawn event at 7:00 pm EDT (2300 GMT), with Biden to speak near the end of an event that the White House has described as a "celebration of community, culture and music."
The event will kick off with a battle of marching bands from Morgan State University in Baltimore and Tennessee State University, in Nashville.
Other performers include dance group Step Afrika!, singer Ledisi, choirs from more historically black colleges and universities, and a Broadway choir.
The president will welcome "community leaders, lawmakers, students educators and hundreds of others to the White House for a historic Juneteenth celebration," White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said, hailing Biden's push to appoint more Black judges, boost Black home ownership rates and drive down Black unemployment to a historic low of 4.7%.
"As the president has said, it's not enough to just commemorate Juneteenth. To honor the true meaning of Juneteenth, we must not rest until we deliver the promise of America for all Americans," she told reporters.
Biden declared Juneteenth - a portmanteau of June and 19th, also known as Emancipation Day - a federal holiday in 2021. It commemorates the day in 1865, after the Confederate states had surrendered to end the Civil War, when a Union general arrived in Texas to inform a group of enslaved African Americans of their freedom under President Abraham Lincoln's 1863 Emancipation Proclamation.
It has been a holiday in Texas since 1980. U.S. presidents dating back to George W. Bush have marked Juneteenth from the White House, often with a somber statement.
(Reporting by Andrea Shalal in Washington; Writing by Heather Timmons; Editing by Leslie Adler and Bill Berkrot)
