Honoring history, celebrating community: Northampton holds inaugural Juneteenth celebration

NORTHAMPTON — Commemorating a holiday that both celebrates the triumphs of Black Americans and reflects on the dark history of slavery in the U.S., residents gathered, for the first time in Northampton, to celebrate Juneteenth Saturday afternoon.

Live music, dancing and comedy filled the air at E.J. Gare Plaza as predominantly Black performers and vendors gathered for a day of community and cultural pride.

“We were just envisioning a space for community to gather, so we didn’t set any limits on how many people could come — one or 100 — it was going to be nice,” said Councilor-At-Large Garrick Perry, who helped organize the event. “Building community isn’t just getting a bunch of people to show up, it’s about building connections with people … it’s probably going to go down as one of my best achievements as a city councilor. I’ve done a lot of work, community building in my life, but this one feels different.”

Juneteenth commemorates June 19, 1865, when Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas, and informed enslaved people they were free, more than two years after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. President Joseph Biden declared Juneteenth a federal holiday in 2021.

Perry credited the event’s success to the Youth Commission, the Arts and Culture Department and the city as a whole, while recognizing Kendal Mangum, a Northampton High School senior and Youth Commission member who helped create a celebration that reflected and honored the city’s Black community.

Mangum, who attended the event she helped organize on the day before her high school graduation, said she grew up knowing about Juneteenth but not celebrating it. She first began planning the event through her role on the Youth Commission and learned about the challenging, but ultimately manageable, process of event planning.

She added that the Juneteenth holiday, to her, carries a bittersweetness reflected in the Black experience today — a painful reminder of the past and present hurdles, but a celebration of progress and resilience.

“The significance, as I came to understand, of how Juneteenth sort of mirrors our current predicament as Black people … it’s obviously really sad that enslaved people in the South were being kept in captivity years longer than [the end of legal slavery], but still we celebrate it joyfully,” she said. “In the South, people will eat red velvet cake, and listen to music while celebrating Juneteenth, and I think that sort of represents our modern-day [experiences] being a Black person. It’s really hard and it’s painful sometimes, but it’s also really fun and really beautiful.”

The occasion’s bittersweetness was sprinkled into the day’s festivities, with singer songwriter Pamela Means’ opening song “Sing for Love,” starting with the lyric “Another white boy with his hands on the trigger,” which came before a soulful and haunting rendition of Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World.”

Comedian Timothy Lovett, the event’s emcee, also brought laughter out of an otherwise dark chapter in American history, joking about the roughly two-year period between the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, which made slavery illegal, and the moment when the last enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, were made aware of their freedom.

“They say everything is bigger in Texas — bigger trucks, bigger hats, bigger, you know, wait times on freedom notifications,” Lovett joked. “Juneteenth is basically the original software update. Two years later, they were like, ‘Congratulations, your freedom has been successfully installed,’ or maybe it was just loading this whole time. It’s like, ‘Hey, did you turn freedom off and turn it back on again?’ But that’s why Juneteenth is important. It’s a celebration of freedom, perseverance and the fact that we can find joy after enduring such incredible hardships.”

Northampton High School senior Amelia Durbin, who chairs the Youth Commission and also worked to help plan the celebration, echoed Mangum’s remarks and thanked her fellow organizers.

Mangum’s grandmother, Sylvia Simon, who declined to provide her age but said she was “in [her] 80s,” explained that her generation feared racist retaliation for celebrating Black achievement and her daughter’s generation, to a lesser extent, did as well.

Simon said she felt proud that her granddaughter, despite having grown up more privileged than her parents or grandparents, still chose to celebrate her roots.

“You have to understand I’m from a different generation, and in my time, you didn’t acknowledge, or you didn’t say anything [about Black pride], because you didn’t want to get in trouble, and to see my granddaughter say, ‘No, no, we can’t do that, we can’t not acknowledge what we’ve contributed to this country, no,’ I’m so proud of her,” Simon said. “We grew up in the South Bronx, whereas she grew up much more privileged, and she could still not denigrate her history, and that’s why we’re so proud of her.”

Mayor Gina-Louise Sciarra, who attended the celebration, also expressed pride in the event, as well as in the young people who worked to organize and plan it.

“We’ve been hoping that we could create an event here in Northampton for a few years, and it took brilliant young people like Kendal to make it happen, and so this is just a really beautiful thing to see,” Sciarra said. “Amelia [Durbin] and [Mangum] are both graduating tomorrow. What an amazing way to culminate their time here in Northampton — to create this beautiful event for our community, celebrating their culture.”