Chatham commemorates Juneteenth
By VICTORIA JOHNSON
Chatham County celebrated Juneteenth last Saturday both online and in person — and throughout it all, speakers offered one overarching message: Complacency kills progress.
“You never get to sit back, you never get to really fully enjoy your victories, because every time you win something, they’re (opponents of racial equity) fighting trying to figure out how to get around. … That is the world that we’re always going to be in,” said Rep. Robert Reives II during Chatham’s Fourth Annual Juneteenth Festival Saturday.
He added: “The lesson you’ve got to learn is that the fight’s never going to end and that fight takes a strong coalition of people.”
Juneteenth signifies June 19, 1865, the day that federal troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, to occupy the state and ensure all slaves were set free. That day, U.S. General Gordon Granger read General Orders 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.”
About two months earlier, Confederate General Robert E. Lee had formally surrendered at the Appomattox Court House in Virginia, marking the end of the Civil War. Two and a half years before that, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which only freed slaves in states waging war against the Union.
To commemorate the occasion, Chatham Organizing for Racial Equity (CORE) produced Saturday’s event, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Pittsboro Fairgrounds, both in person and online.
Reives, Chatham’s representative in the state house (Dist. 54), gave the keynote address. The celebration also hosted a variety of performers, including singer Jennifer Baker, Chatham Dance Connections and poet Alex Johnson.
“I wanted to encourage continual liberation,” Johnson said at the end of his presentation. “Liberation from fear, liberation from inexperience, liberation from self-hate, liberation from separation of ourselves because we are powerful together.”
For those unable to attend, CORE live-streamed the celebration via Facebook and placed the recording on YouTube, which can be viewed at bit.ly/2SObrAw. Terry McMillian of a Sanford-based videography company, Brick Capital Video, also produced a video of the event, which people can view at bit.ly/3gPpj6J.
CORE’s festival wasn’t Chatham’s only Juneteenth celebration. The Chatham Community Library hosted a virtual historical lecture led by North Carolina Central University’s Dr. Charles Thompson from 11:30 to 1:30 Saturday.
The lecture — titled “From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans in Chatham County, N.C.” — was the third in a series of lectures chronicling the county’s communities of color, held in conjunction with the Chatham 250 celebration.
Juneteenth, Thompson said, should be a time to reflect on what African Americans have been through and celebrate Black achievements as well as “the contributions of our allies towards our efforts for freedom.”
“Most importantly — and I cannot emphasize this enough — it also must be a day for recommitting ourselves in tangible ways to the equality and freedom for African Americans,” he added. “Symbolic changes are not enough. We have a way in this nation of celebrating enlightening and extolling processes that are not complete without taking real consideration for where we are.”
Thompson’s lecture traced the history of Chatham County’s African American community from west Africa, the West Indies and the Piedmont all the way to the present day, both in collective and specific terms. To listen to the full lecture, visit the Chatham Community Library’s YouTube page.
The country, he said, has entered another period of reform where people are much more open-minded, and everyone needs to make the most of it. This window of opportunity won’t last forever, he warned, and change requires everyone — especially allies in the white community — to commit to make “definitive steps.”
“No one can do everything, but everyone can do something,” Thompson said. “And the thing that you can do is to change how you think and to work on yourself. Each of us must do this.”
