President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden will host a June 16 concert in a "celebration of community, culture and music," the White House announced Wednesday.
The concert, which will take place on June 13, will be on the South Lawn of the White House. During the event, the White House says it will "elevate American art forms that sing to the soul of the American experience" as part of Black Music Month.
Performing artists include Tony Award winner Audra McDonald, singer and talk show host Jennifer Hudson, and Cliff "Method Man" Smith, a member of the legendary hip-hop group the Wu-Tang Clan.
June 19 marks the moment when the last enslaved people in the United States learned that they were free, which occurred on June 19, 1865, when Union soldiers told enslaved blacks in Galveston, Texas, the news of their freedom. It became a federal holiday in 2021.
“This is a day of profound weight and profound power, a day that we remember the moral stain, the terrible toll that slavery took on the country and continues to take,” Biden said two years ago when he signed into law, backed by by overwhelming bipartisan margins in Congress, which established June 16 as a federal holiday.
