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L.B.
Juneteenth draws 500 to local park
By Jo Appleton
Summer On-line Forty-Niner
Juneteenth in the
town of Terrell, Texas is the biggest holiday celebrated in
its black communities. Growing up there, Long Beach resident
Eva Grant remembers it vividly as being an especially grand
affair.
“It’s really big,” Grant said. “White people celebrate the
Fourth of July but black people celebrate the Nineteenth of
June.”
It has come to be known as Juneteenth and is the oldest known
celebration of the end of slavery, when the last slaves were
freed in Texas.
“It’s catching on,” said Linda Oakley, a Long Beach business
owner who set her custom gift basket booth up Saturday at
the Juneteenth celebration in Long Beach.
Oakley, 43, is originally from Texas and her husband is from
North Carolina, so she often travels back and forth. She said
the King Park crowd was fewer than 500 people.
“It’s a little bit more festive in the South than it is here
because people [here] are still trying to understand what
it’s all about,” Oakley said. “As soon as people start realizing
what Juneteenth is, then I think more people will start participating.”
Some of the attendees at Long Beach’s third annual festival
had heard of Juneteenth, but were not sure what it represented.
Others knew the history of the emancipation of the slaves
in Texas, but did not know there was a day to celebrate.
Long Beach resident Patsy Goodwin said she planned to bring
her family to the park that day because she had noticed the
carnival and stage being set up earlier in the week.
“I don’t know what Juneteenth is,” said Goodwin. “I didn’t
grow up with it and I have no recollection of learning about
it in school. My friend told me that something was going on,
but I didn’t know what is was about,” she said.
Gospel entertainers David Taylor and One Voice performed on
a stage in the middle of the park, set against a colorful
backdrop of a large Juneteenth mural. Family and Friends Gospel
Ensemble and the gospel groups Praise and Infusion also performed
to a crowd of fewer than 100 people seated in neat rows of
plastic chairs covered by a large white tent, that provided
much-needed shade from the bright sun-splashed day.
Circling out from either side of the stage were the food and
craft booths. Beyond those, were about another 300 to 400
hundred people who had grouped around the picnic tables and
grass areas chatting and listening to the soulful hymns of
the choirs.
In other parts of the country, Juneteenth is celebrated with
certain foods, music and church socials. Lamb, chicken and
beef are barbecued, choirs sing, and elders and educators
give speeches and inform the people of the real meaning of
the celebration, said the Juneteenth website that chronicles
the history of the holiday.
Slaves in Texas learned in 1865 that slavery had ended, along
with the Civil War. This was two and a half years after the
Jan. 1, 1863 signing of the Emancipation Proclamation by President
Lincoln, according to the website.
Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas June 19, 1865 and
read Executive Order No. 3, informing every one that “all
slaves are free.” Immediately, the celebrations ensued and
have continued every year since, marking that day in June
as the official date that slavery had ended.
Ironically, Texas needed to catch up with the rest of the
United States in emancipating slaves and now it’s other parts
of the United States that are trying to catch up with Texas
in celebrating Juneteenth.
Lula Briggs Galloway, president of the National Association
of Juneteenth Lineage, Inc., says Juneteenth has a very deep-rooted
meaning.
“It is not just about music and dancing and having a good
time,” said Galloway. “It’s also supposed to educate the public
about why we’re there and why we are supporting what it’s
about.”
It’s also about slavery, she added. “Without slavery, there
is no independence for us.”
Galloway, who wrote “Juneteenth: Ring the Bell of Freedom,”
established the Juneteenth Creative Culture Center in Michigan
through her efforts with the association. NAJL is not just
about June 19 she said. Its year-round dedication is to educating
communities on the significance of Juneteenth. The date has
been an official Texas state holiday since 1980, when former
Gov. William P. Clemens Jr. signed the bill into law.
A small group of activists are now lobbying Congress to get
the third weekend in June made the official Juneteenth holiday
weekend nationwide, which Galloway said she does not support.
Galloway insisted that educating people is more important
than a holiday. On a national level, the association is working
on getting its history into school curriculum at all levels
of education, kindergarten through college, she said.
NAJL, which is based in Michigan, recently joined forces with
SBC Communications, and its family of telecommunications companies,
which include Pacific Bell, Southwestern Bell and Ameritech,
and in 2000, it became the association’s first national title
sponsor.
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Jo Appleton/Summer
On-line Forty-Niner
The rap group, Western Conference, performed
at King Park in Long Beach, Saturday, at the city's third
annual Juneteenth festival, the oldest known celebration of
the ending of slavery.
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