When I was a little girl, living in an Army family, we travelled the world.  Outside the U.S., we didn’t celebrate all the national holidays — with the exception of New Year’s, Christmas and Easter — because we lived on army bases around the world.  Different countries had specific cultural celebrations and it was hard to be American except for the shared holidays.  When my army dad was sent to Viet Nam, we went back to my mother’s home in the South until he returned to his family.  We arrived in Memphis where my mother’s elder sister lived and to the city that was only 40 miles from Como, Mississippi where my maternal grandparents, uncles, and extended Cunningham and Partee families lived for generations.  We returned to our ancestral home and began immediately participating in family traditional celebrations like the 4^th of July.

Our family’s traditional celebration of the Independence holiday always followed the same pattern; children received a new outfit, adults barbecued all kinds of delicious foods like chicken, hot dogs, hot links, hamburger, and always ribs.  Side dishes were also traditional, like potato salad with either mayonnaise or Miracle Whip, coleslaw, baked beans, spaghetti, and lots of corn on the cob.  If people were really happy, they cooked some type of greens with okra and buttery cornbread.  Desserts included watermelon, cakes from scratch and home-made ice-cream, sweet tea, lemonade and cold Fanta sodas; grape, orange, strawberry and sometimes peach.  We had a feast while all were welcomed to Sardis Beach to celebrate Independence Day.  On the Black side of the beach, there was sun, sand and family love.  On the White folk’s side of the beach, there was beach furniture, boat launches for their boats and a stunning fireworks display.  All the things we didn’t have on our side.  Sardis Beach accurately reflected the USA in 1968, the clear racial divide with less for everyone who was not White.

I heard our relatives talking underneath this nationwide celebration, with their stark observations that this was a White folk’s event and Black folks were not free to do anything in America but die too soon.  Every year we still bought the outfits from White-owned businesses, purchased the food from White-owned grocery stores, bought the fireworks from Whites too and watched our money go out of our communities to never benefit us but support the people who mistreated us.

The Juneteenth Celebration is exactly the opposite.  We celebrate our real freedom from slavery from June 1865.  Now the entire nation celebrates with us since Juneteenth is a federal holiday since 2021.  It has always been the oldest nationally commemoration of the ending of slavery in the U.S.  Madison has been celebrating Juneteenth for decades, Milwaukee has celebrated longer and Galveston, Texas where Juneteenth originated, has celebrated 157 years in 2022, although it took years to celebrate everywhere.

Our fight to be free and to stay free is symbolized by the Juneteenth Celebration which focuses on family, our people, our heritage, traditions and experiences.  As a people, we have had a difficult time during COVID-19.  Juneteenth 2022 will once again be celebrated in Penn Park from 10 am until 6 pm thru the work of Annie Weatherby Flowers and community volunteers working with Kujichagulia, Inc.  In the open air of the park, with hopefully, vaccinated people, come celebrate the freedom of Black people with the rest of the African American community in Madison.