This weekend organizations across Cambridge are hosting celebrations and commemorations for Juneteenth. 2022 marks only the second year that Juneteenth has been recognized as a Federal holiday, but what is Juneteenth and why does it matter? In 1863, Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, an executive order declaring all enslaved people held in confederate states free. However, it wasn’t until June 19th of 1865 that federal troops arrived in Galveston, Texas to announce and enforce their release. The day is now celebrated as the end of slavery in the United States, though there is still much left to be done. It’s a day to uplift African American voices, celebrate African American joy, and honor those who were robbed of their freedom and made to endure the inhumanity of American slavery. If you haven’t already made your own celebratory and/or commemorative plans, consider joining any of these many events happening right in our own neighborhood.
6/16 @ 12:15-1:30 pm Come to Joan Lorentz Park, 449 Broadway to catch a reggae performance by the Mystic Jammers
6/18 12-9:00 pm Catch a full day of activities from the Margaret Fuller House at 155 Harvard St. including yoga, a presentation on Joy in a historic Black Church in Cambridgeport by the Black History in Action for Cambridgeport (BHAC), and a Black Business Fair. They’ll be ending the evening with biking and skating at Hoyt Field.
6/18 @ 12-2:00 pm The Central Square Branch of the Cambridge Public Library will be hosting a Juneteenth celebration for all ages. There will be storytelling, music from the Albino Mbie Band, cupcakes, sidewalk chalk, and crafts. Visit the CPL events page for more details.
6/19 @ 3 pm The Cambridge Black History Project will be meeting at the Old Burying Ground at the intersection of Massachusetts Ave & Garden Street to honor and commemorate two African Americans buried there. Guests are welcomed to stand outside the gate to witness the ceremony.
6/19 @ 7:00 pm The Longfellow House and Museum of African American History have partnered to host a poetry reading and film screening of Jubilee Juneteenth and the Thirteenth. Learn more and register here.
6/20 @ 9-12:00 pm The Cambridge Families of Color Coalition and Starlight are hosting a parade at City Hall.
See the city’s Eventbrite page for more details and events!
This Juneteenth please reconsider repeating the canard that enslaved Africans in Texas did not know about the Emancipation Proclamation before June 19, 1865. See, for example,
’We knowed what was goin’ on in [the war] all the time,’ Felix Haywood later remembered. At emancipation, ‘We all felt like heroes and nobody had made us that way but ourselves.’
From—
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/hidden-history-of-juneteenth?fbclid=IwAR1UlM0ZlCvUqp6C-EYmJS82Cyz_FN1thJz9eSa3UJ2CXV-ehUJSb2UDHv0
The origin story of Juneteenth is better described as the time Union Army troops finally arrived to assure black Texans of their protection as they left the plantations and negotiated their emancipation.
Read the actual words of General Order No. 3: “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freed are advised to remain at their present homes, and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts; and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.”
And, of course, it was not the end of legal slavery in the USA—that took the 13th Amendment to the Constitution.
Also see
Robin Washington’s
https://forward.com/opinion/471597/juneteenth-what-really-happened/