Reflection and celebration were the focus of the Juneteenth Jubilee Festival this weekend in Oak Bluffs.
Made a federal holiday in 2021, Juneteenth recognizes when enslaved people in Texas finally heard they were free in 1865, more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. To commemorate the holiday, the cultural festival on Saturday highlighted Black art, music and achievement.
The festival started with performers Amanda Diamond and Roger Smith reading from monologues by pioneering social reformers Amanda Smith and Frederick Douglass, who both came to Oak Bluffs in the 1800s.
Kahina Van Dyke, festival organizer and owner of the Narragansett House hotel in Oak Bluffs, gave the audience an introduction to the performances.
“Both [Amanda and Frederick] were enslaved, and they found their freedom, but what I love most about their stories is they spent the entire rest of their life fighting for everyone else’s freedom,” Ms. Van Dyke said.
The festival also celebrated a trailblazer in space. Astronaut Joan Higginbotham, the third African American woman to go into space, was a guest speaker at the event, and she spoke about her path to becoming an astronaut.
Born in the south side of Chicago, the importance of education was instilled in her by her parents at a young age.
“I used to say I was either born an engineer or going to be an engineer, because I was doing stuff I shouldn’t have been doing that age,” she said when thinking back to her childhood. Before high school, Ms. Higginbotham was introduced to a program titled Inroads, a former pre-engineering program for women and minorities.
“It showed me what I could do with my love of math and science and all this tinkering I was getting into,” she said.
Starting her career at IBM, she then went to work at NASA as an electrical engineer. It would take her 10 years after her first application to become an astronaut to finally go into space as a crewmember of the Space Shuttle Discovery mission STS-116.
“I threw myself a little pity party after that first phone call [when I was denied],” she said. “I allowed myself some time to be upset, and then I was like...if I had not done everything that I could within my own power to make myself a better candidate, then I would have been disappointed with myself. So I had to do as much as I could to better my chances.”
Other speakers included Karida Brown, author of The Battle for the Black Mind. Ms. Brown spoke about learning how to take agency of herself from the ones who came before her.
“We must continue to tell our stories, and for some of us, the work is to be a keeper of Black people, places and things, telling our stories so that we may remember not only what we’ve been through, but all that we’ve built,” Ms. Brown said.
A video was also shown to the audience about Greenwood, a neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, known as Black Wall Street, and the aftermath of the Tulsa race massacre in 1921.
Ms. Van Dyke said she wanted to show the video because she has found many people didn’t know Black Wall Street existed and the ensuing massacre that occurred.
“I show [the video] because sometimes people talk about murdering people and you think it’s a mythology,” she said. “You think it’s a fairy tale. You think it’s Cinderella, you think it’s Robin Hood. No, this is real footage. We need to honor them and elevate them and acknowledge what was lost and what remains.”
The second half of the program featured musical performances from Greg Banks, Donna McElroy and students from the Berklee College of Music. The festival ended with a crowd singalong of Lean On Me by Bill Withers.
Saturday’s cultural festival was part of a four-day lineup of events.
On Thursday, a community portrait pop-up was held on Circuit avenue, where people could have their portraits taken by Jasmine Ross as a part of a project to archive the people of Oak Bluffs and their subsequent stories. On Friday, the day was filled with conversation about black wealth equity from panel guests such as Chief Egunwale Amusan, author of America’s Black Wall Street, and Martin Kimani, CEO of the African Center.
Rev. Dr. Michael Eric Dyson was set to close out the Jubilee events with a service at Union Chapel and a water ceremony at Inkwell Beach.
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