Juneteenth celebration looks different this year

WASHINGTON — Nonprofit group Washington for Justice spent this week hosting a variety of Juneteenth-related events leading up the holiday (June 19) celebrating the day federal troops found and freed the last Black slaves in Galveston Texas, after the Civil War.

“It is a big deal, it was a big deal for our country that 4 million African Americans were emancipated,” Washington for Justice Organizer Dan Henderson said. “This is part of our season of freedom between June 19 and July 4. They go together, and in fact, if we can’t understand why to celebrate June 19, we probably don’t understand what July 4 is all about.”

Because the holiday itself falls on a Sunday this year, Henderson said the group set up programming through the entire week leading up to the day to avoid family conflicts, concluding with a family day in Washington Central Park on Saturday.

“As the committee started talking about it … we started thinking, we could do a run-up to Juneteenth by offering (a) variety of activities,” Henderson said. “Rather than just doing one concert and maybe a few activities in the park, maybe we can do a little bit more around presenting Black Iowans who are talented and make a contribution to the state … and do some education.”

Henderson said the goal of the week was to change the way people think about historically white communities in Southeast Iowa.

“It has a good message to it,” he said. “All of the things we’re trying to do are to promote racial harmony, understanding, empathy and kind of a multicultural view of small-town Iowa. That’s sort of the goal.”

This year’s programming has a central theme: “Be like Buxton,” named after a town in Southeast Iowa.

“That theme sort of emerged, of Buxton, Iowa, as both a metaphor and a historical fact became intertwined with what we were doing,” Henderson said. “Buxton was community that was about half Black, half white. This was around 1900 during the Jim Crow era, but they found a way to create equality and non-discrimination and non-segregation. Black miners and white miners made the same amount of money, and it was really a remarkable community given the time that it was in.”

The theme is clear through the programming. The week brings to town a pop-up exhibit at the library on Buxton from the African American History Museum; a puppet show about Buxton; and author Rachelle Chase, who wrote a book about Buxton, all to Washington.

“(Be like Buxton) is kind of a call to visualize what a multiethnic Midwestern community can look like,” Henderson said. “We’re not that diverse yet in Washington, but we will be, it’s growing. In order to make our town welcoming and inclusive, I think people, particularly the white majority in town, need to think about, consciously, ‘What kind of community do we want this to be as it becomes more diverse?’ Buxton creates that role model.”

Buxton said the message was not one of criticism, but optimism.

“This is a pretty white town, and so the privilege has pretty much always been to the white community, so it’s about how we navigate that in a way that’s helpful,” he said. “It’s not a negative message at all, we’re hoping that it will be a positive one, and kind of call us to our highest ideals.”

Bringing so many people to town, Henderson said, helped shape that positive attitude.

“These are folks who I’m hoping, as they get to know Washington and they get to know the work we’re doing, they’ll feel like, ‘Hey, that’s a community that I could come to and feel comfortable in,” he said. “Jean Berry talked about that, she said, ‘Man, I could move down here, it’d be a great place to live.’ That’s exactly the kind of response we want to get from people of color.”

Comments: Kalen.McCain@southeastiowaunion.com