“How wonderful to see you all glistening in the sun,” Phylicia Rashad said in Times Square, accepting this year’s Legacy Award from the Broadway League as part of the fourth annual Broadway Celebrates Juneteenth, a 90 minute concert featuring some three dozen Broadway performers from the casts of fifteen current shows delivering  some dozen musical numbers and medleys. In addition, the singing group “Young Gifted and Broadway” performed “Seize the Day” from Newsies: The Musical. William Rhem Jr., currently in the cast of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” recited once again his Juneteenth-specific spoken word piece, “On this Day of Freedom”

And Deborah Cox, currently in The Wiz, serenaded Rashad.

Below are videos offering moments from the event, including snippets of performances, and one full one (NaTasha Yvette Williams sings Nina Simone) as well Rashad, Dorian Harewood, host Michael James Scott, Deborah Cox and others briefly reflecting on the day. Juneteenth commemorates the emancipation of enslaved African Americans, and became an official federal holiday in 2021.  It marks the day – June 19, 1865, two years after the Emancipation Proclamation – when Major General Gordon Granger proclaimed freedom for enslaved people in Texas.

 “For those of you who may not know. I am from Houston, Texas,” Rashad told the crowd, “and Juneteenth resonates in Texas because this is where it begins. And every year on June 10, my father and his associates, all the other dentists in Houston, hosted a picnic. It was amazing. They serve barbecue and beans and potato salad and watermelon and red soda. It was a time of celebration of family community. And that’s what I see today…”