LOS ALTOS IS KNOWN for many things like its famous apricot orchards, or its Windy Hill Open Space Preserve, but over the last seven years, its annual Juneteenth festival has earned its way to being one of the city’s most prominent events.
On Saturday, Justice Vanguard, a Los Altos nonprofit centered on educating and empowering the local community to promote social justice, put on its seventh annual Juneteenth celebration, which draws thousands every year.
Upon learning that the event was being covered by the press, Kenan Moos — who, along with Kiyoshi Taylor, is one of Justice Vanguard’s cofounders — yelled playfully from the stage nearby, “It’s about time!”
Juneteenth marks the day in 1865 when Union soldiers reached Galveston, Texas, and were finally able to enforce the order freeing the people still enslaved there — more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. It didn’t become a federal holiday until 2021.
According to Justice Vanguard’s mission statement, the organization is dedicated to educating and empowering communities to dismantle systemic racism and promote social justice. The festival itself is staffed almost entirely by interns recruited from across Bay Area high schools who run the booths and keep the day moving.
The festival began with a land acknowledgment which recognizes and honors the history of the people who inhabited this space before them. They then moved into live music, speeches, drum circles, and dances, each one drawn from a different part of the African diaspora to show the range of Black identity.
When people weren’t moored to their seats, punctuating each performance with a clap, an amen, or a sniffle, they were traveling between the different booths of the festival. These tables displayed things such as custom Ghanaian jewelry and traditional Nigerian clothing.
There was also art from Black and Indigenous artists across the Bay working in oil paint, spray paint and pyrography, including a signed piece from the Black Panther Party’s Emory Douglas.
When people weren’t at the booths, they were lined up at the food trucks and drink stands serving Jamaican food, catfish, punch and frozen lemonade. Zines and handwritten signs were tucked in between, each one carrying a fact about Black history that hasn’t usually made it into a classroom.
Justice Vanguard’s Juneteenth tradition predates when it became a federal holiday by a year. Taylor says the very first version of it happened on Juneteenth in 2020, when he and about 30 of his peers walked around Mountain View with pizza boxes, offering slices as a gesture of community to anyone open to receiving it. Soon after, the gathering moved to Los Altos and became the annual festival it is today. Six years and seven festivals later, it hasn’t stopped.
Celebrating Juneteenth in Los Altos may seem like an interesting choice. According to the 2025 U.S. Census Bureau, less than 1% of the city’s roughly 30,000 residents are Black, and that population was almost certainly smaller still when Taylor and Moos were growing up there.
But demographics didn’t keep thousands of people from showing up to the Juneteenth gathering this year — with many traveling in from San Francisco, San Jose, San Carlos, and elsewhere around the Bay. And that is exactly what Taylor and Moos hoped for when they decided to hold the annual celebration in their hometown.
Taylor, who is Black and Japanese, was born in Columbus, Ohio, but was raised in Los Altos. Moos, who is of Caribbean and German descent, was born in Mountain View and also grew up in Los Altos. Despite spending their childhoods in the city that the festival now calls home, both say they faced racism there from classmates, the community more broadly, and the police — both being pulled over a combined 57 times.
Taylor grew up in the Hillview neighborhood, a block from where the festival is held today, and says the neighborhood never felt like his.
“It was very isolating,” he said. “It felt like we were missing a part of our culture, so we had to make it.”
How can we bring Black joy? How can we tell people what Black joy is, and not just Black joy, but if you are Black, you are welcome?
Kiyoshi Taylor, one of Justice Vanguard’s cofounders
The idea to host Juneteenth in Los Altos began as a desire to bring the acceptance of Black culture to the community and a way to honor the past.
“What can we bring George Floyd, Trayvon Martin, Emmett Till?” asked Taylor. “How can we bring Black joy? How can we tell people what Black joy is, and not just Black joy, but if you are Black, you are welcome?”
Both wanted to create a space where Black people could “just be happy,” Taylor said.
“Never in a million years would I have thought growing up that Los Altos could look like this. It stems from me and Kenan’s experiences of being outcast, being unaccepted, and wanting to change that so no one else would.”
Near the end of the day, musician Eric Dozier took the stage and asked the kids who were playing a few feet in front of him if they recognized “This Little Light of Mine,” then brought them up onstage to sing it with him. As he played out the melody on his keyboard, he asked the crowd to say aloud the name of someone they’d lost. Names were shouted with feeling and some even wept.
“Spirit does not descend without song,” said Dozier, quoting his grandfather.
He asked everyone to come close, and for a few minutes everyone sang both to and from a lineage of people who are no longer here but for a moment had descended.
“Juneteenths growing up looked nothing like this one,” said Taylor with satisfaction. “You grow up fast when you grow up Black. My upbringing wasn’t like this — we weren’t able to celebrate like this. And look at all these other kids, they get to grow up with something I didn’t get, and I love it.”