Celebrating Juneteenth
Jahquai “Qualiti” Oliver performs at the Juneteenth celebration commemorating the end of slavery in the United States at the African American Cultural Center of the Capital Region in Albany on Saturday.
“It can be difficult to discuss things like freedom, racism and segregation in our history, and I appreciate you all having the courage to stand here, show face and celebrate with like-minded people,” Travon Jackson told a crowd Saturday afternoon.
It was the 17th celebration in the city of Juneteenth, observing June 19, 1865, the day the last enslaved people in the U.S. — in Texas, where slavery was still permissible under state law despite the Emancipation Proclamation ostensibly having ended it two and a half years before — had their freedom declared and enforced by Union Army Gen. Gordon Granger. Saturday block’s party was the fourth Juneteenth held in Albany’s South End, a neighborhood of predominantly Black residents, and the first with Juneteenth as a federal holiday, passed quickly by Congress only a few days earlier and signed into law by President Biden on Thursday.
If the new status of Juneteenth was a figurative background for remarks by Jackson, executive director of the celebration’s sponsor, the African American Cultural Center of the Capital Region, an equally new, literal background overlooked the cultural center’s garden, where Jackson and others spoke. A mural, painted recently several stories high on the south wall of the center by Albany artists Samson Contompasis and Mahodd Harvin, shows champions of Black freedom and progress including Malcolm X, Angela Davis, Bayard Rustin and, leading a 1965 civil-rights march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
The last new federal holiday enacted, in 1983, was for King ’s birthday.
As crowds, largely free of masks, strolled South Pearl Street to visit booths
selling wares as varied as fuzzy slippers and weightloss potions, and offering information on banking, health care and social justice, speaker after speaker, in remarks public and private, echoed twin themes of honoring the past and reminding of work still left undone to offset centuries of oppression and enforced disadvantage.
“We are going to dismantle systemic racism and its policies,” said Wanda Willingham, a fourthterm member of the Albany County Legislature, co-founder of its Legislative Black Caucus and the first woman and first Black deputy chair of the legislature.
“Why did it take 156 years to become a federal holiday?” said Albany County Executive Dan Mccoy, noting that some black communities in America have celebrated Juneteenth since 1866.
Reparations to descendants of enslaved Black Americans must be an open and ongoing discussion, said Albany Mayor Kathy Sheehan. The issue got a boost when the recently ended session of the state Legislature included passage of a measure to establish a reparations task force, said Serena Whitelake, a member of the board of directors of the African American Cultural Center. Racism’s ugly legacy remains manifest in significant societal matters including housing, health care, police brutality and voting access, said Marco Flagg, program manager of the Capital District Center for Law and Justice, who was staffing the organization’s table at the Juneteenth block party.
“It’s so important to have this celebration here, where people live,” said Jackson, noting that for its first 13 years in Albany, the Juneteenth observance was held in Washington Park. “This neighborhood is where people experience oppression — a neighborhood with police stations, poor housing and lackluster support for business from public officials . ... That’s why it needs to be here, to approach people in their environment about the very real issues that they deal with every day, because, as far as the federal government and a lot of people are concerned, Juneteenth is just another day off. It shouldn’t be.”