Black Southerners Created the Unity Culture around Juneteenth
The community, the love, the culture. It’s weird to see people celebrating Juneteenth this year after years of it being ignored.
You could hear everyone before you saw them. Maze and Frankie Beverly would belt around the trees, reminding everyone that we are one, and that’s the way it is. As the day warmed up, domino games, dancing teenagers, and sizzling barbeque would flood your senses. I’d fill up on that and copious amounts of orange soda before circling the park a few times with my cousins. After I was sufficiently nauseous, the sun had set, and the mosquitoes came out for their own evening soiree, we’d pack up and head home.
In my youth, Juneteenth was always a point of celebration for my family and me. We looked forward to spending time together at parades, church, or parties with hundreds of other Black Texans from around the area — especially after living our daily lives in a majority white city. The event was typically held in my hometown, the seat of Brazoria County, so people would come from all over.
My mother and her siblings were born in our country town. Many of them would migrate into Houston and other cities later in life, while we stayed behind and took care of my grandmother. Eventually, a few years after her passing, we joined them and began living in the city as well. Before that time, however, we spent many summers in the town park celebrating “Jubilee Day.”
This year marks the 155th anniversary of the end of slavery in the state of Texas, the last place to notify enslaved Black people that they were free. This event happened in Galveston, Texas, an hour away from my hometown. My ancestors in this area started the celebration. In 1980, it would officially be recognized as a state holiday: Juneteenth.
In school, no one cared about the custom and, if they did know, they’d laugh. Is it safe to be around so many Black people? My peers were racist, ignorant non-Black children who would mock me and other Black kids for attending the event and other things that colored us as different (hairstyling, vernacular, music choices, etc.). Their parents were the same age as my aunts and uncles, and their school days mirrored mine. One of my aunts was in the first class to integrate the local high school. It was not a place where Blackness was celebrated in the every day, which was what made this day — and the community — so important.
It’s something that I carried with me my entire life: No matter where you look, if there are Black people, you’re with family.
It was also a time to remind ourselves that every Black person in the area was family. Older women would yell at us to stop running before we tripped, and it was okay because they were all our grandmothers. Older men would ask us to pass them a beer and grab ourselves ice pops (or a “soda water”) in the meantime, and it was okay because they were all our uncles. It’s something that I carried with me my entire life: No matter where you look, if there are Black people, you’re with family.
It’s a message reinforced in Black music, in Black media, and Black literature. Supposedly, we have much in common with other Black people regardless of location. In the Northeast, my experience exposed these lessons as superficialities. I found little in the way of Black camaraderie when I left Texas for college — the nod you pass to acknowledge each other, looking out for the children of other Black families, or holding space for one another to speak in places where we were ignored.
I was shocked by the competitiveness of other Black college students and coworkers. Even with a Black professor who studied and taught Black feminism, it felt lonely. We disagreed on different parts of her course, like allowing non-Black students in the class to pick apart AAVE (as we were reading Zora Neal Hurston) as an exercise by looking up terms on “Urban Dictionary”. I was infuriated. I told her, “My family still speaks like this. I still speak like this even though I code-switch. It feels dismissive.” As you can imagine, I did not get a good grade in the class.
I had other peers allude to me being a “crab in a bucket” because I was quite vocal about the racism and classism I faced on campus. I believe they were worried about me making other Black students look inadequate or unable to cut it. In my first professional job in Boston, the HR director was a Black woman who told me that “something was wrong with [me]” for quitting after extensive amounts of racism from coworkers.
The homey feeling of Blackness is something unique to the South.
I quickly learned that the homey feeling of Blackness is something unique to the South. People who didn’t grow up with the community I had or who had spent their life internalizing anger about their race did not feel the same. Obviously, I’ve met some kinder Black people since leaving home, but, coincidentally, they always have some connection to Southern states like Georgia, Louisiana, or Texas.
I haven’t been to a Juneteenth celebration since I moved away from home at 18. My college was a small liberal arts school in Western Massachusetts. On the first June spent away from home, I asked older Black students on the campus where they celebrated the holiday. They did not. I’ve lived in Boston and Baltimore after graduating, but I haven’t celebrated since. Even today, I’m spending at home — a self-care day spent singing cookout songs to my dog and curled up in bed.
I guess I should be happy, so many people are rallying behind making Juneteenth a national holiday. Black people in my area kept the tradition alive for quite some time while many other communities “moved on.” So yes, it is weird to see people celebrating something I was laughed at for. And so loudly. I understand that people feel empowered by the recent protests and by Black voices. Still, it feels like appropriation in a way. It’s fine to educate your family and friends about the meaning behind the day. However, I do feel it is overstepping to stake so much claim to it if you ignore the impact of Southern Black communities on its meaning.
