Juneteenth event planned at Memorial Park
Black business leaders want to continue tradition started last year
LANSDALE >> A new event to honor a now-familiar date could happen later this month.
Borough officials have voted ahead a request to hold a commemoration marking Juneteenth in Memorial Park.
“I don’t necessarily like to call it a ‘celebration’ of Juneteenth, but the actual day and the celebration of us as a people,” said Shaykh Anwar Muhammad, president of the Ambler area NAACP and owner of the Black Reserve Bookstore in Lansdale.
Last summer, Muhammad was among the local leaders who helped organize the first-ever formal celebration of Juneteenth in town, a solidarity march up and down Main Street meant to commemorate the end of slavery following the end of the Civil War in 1865. At that time, borough Mayor Garry Herbert presented Muhammad and local Black leaders with a borough proclamation recognizing the day, and borough officials, residents and businesses have vowed to build on protests in 2020 to better recognize and fight inequality and racism.
This year’s commemoration will be more formal, Muhammad told council’s parks and recreation committee Wednesday night: an event in Memorial Park,
from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on June 19, organized in conjunction with the Lansdale Black Business Association.
“There will be performances, spoken word, there’ll be music, vending, things of that nature — performances, there’ll be an oral history given,” detailing the significance of Juneteenth to the Black community, Muhammad said.
Roughly 20 local Black businesses have expressed interest in taking part, he added, and no road closures would be needed, only use of the park itself. Parks and recreation director Karl Lukens asked where specifically in the park the event would be held, and Muhammad said likely near the brick circle between Main Street and the adjacent ballfield. Muhammad asked if the borough had any equipment the group could use, such as a stage or sound equipment, and councilman Bill Henning said they did not, with Lukens adding that the borough typically rents such equipment as-needed for its own events.
“The only other thing is that there is a baseball game that is scheduled for that day, at a similar time,” Lukens said, on the park’s Weaver Field adjacent to the area where the event would be held.
Muhammad said he anticipated about a hundred visitors on his event application to the borough, but that number was uncertain since this would be the first such event held. The event request has been vetted by the borough’s special events committee, Lukens added, and would need a fee payment and final proof of insurance before full council approval on June 16.
“That would be the way to move it out of committee — contingent upon the approval of the special event committee, which means the insurance and the fee,” said councilwoman Mary Fuller.
Muhammad said he would finalize those details with borough staff in the next few days, and councilwoman Meg Currie Teoh then made a motion to allow the use of Memorial Park for the commemoration. The parks and recreation committee unanimously approved it, pending the final details, and full council could do so when they next meet in two weeks.
Borough council next meets at 7 p.m. on June 16 at borough hall, 1 Vine Street; for more information visit www.Lansdale. org.