Madison’s 37th Annual Juneteenth Day Celebration: Our History and Presence
Josue Peralta (l) is providing the coordination and Annie Weatherby-Flowers is providing the soul for Madison’s Juneteenth Day celebration.
by Jonathan Gramling
It was on June 19, 1865 that the first Juneteenth spontaneously occurred in the streets of Galveston, Texas when the last Africans who were enslaved learned that they had been freed by Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863. And the celebration has been going on ever since in some way, shape and form.
Milwaukee’s Juneteenth celebration began in 1971 and the celebration was held on blocks of what is now Dr. Martin Luther King Drive. The joyous festival made a deep impression on Annie Weatherby-Flowers.
“All of the churches and the restaurants, the fire and police departments on each side of Center Street would open up and so the kids could and do the fire truck,” Weatherby-Flowers recalled. “Unlike the rumors of the police in Milwaukee, on Juneteenth, you saw a different interaction. The police became human. The police became fathers. The police became volunteers. It was a different kind of experience that we normally saw. And it was all connected to Juneteenth.”
For Weatherby-Flowers, it was a time when all of the different segments of Milwaukee’s Black community came together as one unified community.
“Juneteenth was when you saw all of the college students who came back home,” she said. “You were there with the doctors, lawyers, advocates and the preachers. You were also there with single mothers and kids without supervision. But we were all there. I remember seeing Smokey Robinson singing in a vacant lot. And so those are the kind of things that I have in terms of why it is important. I’ve experienced it as an individual living in a community that was divided. And on that day, we were all eating roast corn and barbecue. There were church services along Third Street. And then we had people like Smokey Robinson and Howard Hewett. We had all kinds of folks who came. And back then, Dr. Bop was still alive. And so WNOV and all of the Black radio stations made announcements. It was a way for us to celebrate our community and our achievements and most importantly our Blackness.”
The educational aspect of Juneteenth was important to Weatherby-Flowers. As the Sankofa bird symbolizes, it is important to know your past so you understand the present and can chart a course for the future.
“The significance of Juneteenth has not changed for me,” Weatherby-Flowers said. “It is a collective opportunity to celebrate more than just Emancipation; it’s more about awareness and resilience. So over the years, the focus has been Black Resilience because we are community that gets knocked down, but then we bounce back. After slavery — when it was against the law for folks to read — within a 30 year period, 60 percent of Blacks across the country were literate, meaning they could read. They started their own colleges, fraternities, their own churches, and their own businesses. You can look at all of these historical things that we did in terms of development and discovery. We invented blood transfusions, elevators, and traffic lights. Those people would have been killed just 30 years earlier for even talking about that. But some of those traditions and values were transferred and communicated by the community. That’s why we talk about resilience, the ability to bounce back.”
And there have been cycles of advancement and retrenchment ever since. Weatherby-Flowers cited some of the policies enacted in the 1960s.
“The family, the Black woman was one of the biggest targets of that era,” Weatherby-Flowers observed. “Prior to that, it was the Black male with the War on Poverty, when a man could not live with his family if he wasn’t a bread winner. This is the thing that we need to know. We need to know the good, the bad, the ugly while also looking at all of the accomplishments and how we had the ability to bounce back.”
At the same time, African Americans were making major contributions to the world.
“We have contributed to not only America in a big way, but to the world,” Weatherby-Flowers emphasized. “And we are 90 percent of America’s pop culture. So there is a lot that we need to know in coming together.”
When Weatherby-Flowers moved to Madison in the later 1980s, she brought Juneteenth with her. She and Mona Adams Winston put together a committee to plan Madison’s first Juneteenth celebration at Penn Park. And it’s been going strong ever since.
“Initially, I wanted it to be like the big picnics that used to be in the church where everything was community-based, church-based,” Weatherby-Flowers said. “Women brought the food. And the men barbecued. And they had cake there. And the church choirs and the local musicians performed. It wasn’t about foundation money. It was about community ownership.”
For Weatherby-Flowers, the importance of community ownership has become important as the attacks on Civil Rights continue.;
“Juneteenth is important today because of all of the significant changes and the attacks on DEI and the Voting Rights Act,” Weatherby-Flowers said. “We’ve been where you couldn’t vote. And we overcame that. And so we need to be more diligent because we may have more power or knowledge and more influence, so we need to celebrate that, our presence and our history so that we don’t perish because of the lack of knowledge. It’s important that we understand that and understand our power that contradicts what the political climate is suggesting or implying. DEI disappeared everywhere. Sponsorship is really being affected across the nation. I’m on the National Juneteenth Foundation board. It’s all over the country. This is the new Jim Crow, for real.”
While Weatherby-Flowers will always be the “soul” of Juneteenth, she has stepped back this year to more of a mentoring role for this year’s coordinator Josue Peralta. Peralta has know Weatherby-Flowers since he entered the job market.
“I originally got to meet Annie when I first started working for the city of Madison,” Peralta recalled. “All the way back in 2015, I was like fresh out of high school. And I was lucky and blessed enough to get a job at the Department of Civil Rights. And Annie was kind enough to take me under her wing where I learned a lot. And it was very peculiar because I was 19-years-old working with people who were 2-3 times my age. But I was able to soak in a lot of that knowledge. And that is one of the things that I was grateful for. That contact with Annie later turned into, ‘Hey can you help me with Juneteenth?’ But all along, she’s been mentoring me for many years at this point.”
Madison’s Juneteenth celebration begins on Saturday, June 20th with the parade which used to start at Fountain of Life and go north on Park Street. Now it negins at the Labor Temple and heads south on Park Street to Buick Street.
“People gather for the parade along Park Street around 10:45 p.m. to make sure that you don’t miss any of the floats. For parking, I would say park along Beld Street or Fisher, Center or Taft. Just look for a legal parking space because there will be no parking along Park Street. I do want everyone to experience the parade. It starts at Wingra Street, takes a hard right onto the north bound lanes of Park Street. And it a left onto Buick Street and ends at Penn Park. For the parade, we have about 30 participants. We have more participants signing up every day.”
The Juneteenth celebration at Penn Park starts at noon and ends at 5 p.m. There will be a lot to do with 30 vendors planning to be there. And the children will have plenty to learn and have fun in the Children’s Tent.
“The Madison Children’s Museum will be there,” Peralta said. “UW science departments will bring all kinds of little experiments so that the kids can interact and things like that. We also have Madison Public Library who is going to bring the Dream Bus and the Reading Project. Women in Focus will be giving away books and will have guest readers. There will be face painters.”
And there is a special treat for the kids who participate in the tent.
“There will be a bounce house and all the kids who attend the Children’s Tent will also get a free hot dog with chips and a drink,” Peralta said. “That is in partnership with the Madison Police Department who will be grilling. The only thing that the kids have to do is go to the Children’s Tent, have a great time and then ask for a ticket for them to take to the police officers. We thank them for helping us out a lot with that.”
And there is a health and wellness tent.
“We thank the Foundation for Black Women’s Wellness who are helping us with the Wellness Tent,” Peralta said. “There’s going to be some really good programming there. UW-Madison will be there to share a lot of medical information with the public. I was talking with someone there this past week and they are going to bring a lot of things for the kids to look at and be able to touch. That’s going to be exciting.”
And of course there is the music.
“There’s going to be a lot of great music by the Juneteenth Band,” Peralta said. “Rick Flowers is still performing. I know that everyone is also excited about the Gospel Tent that goes on every year. We thank the African American Council of Churches for putting that on.”
Juneteenth is truly a community celebration led also by the Juneteenth Committee that helps bring everything together. And in these difficult times with the gutting of the Voting Rights Act and other anti-civil rights policies, the community needs to come together now more than ever, especially in light of the cuts to financial support.
“If you remember, Harry Belafonte, Sidney Portier, all of those Black actors and professionals supported the Civil Rights Movement,” Weatherby-Flowers said. “They were marching with them and they were paying for a lot of the things that they needed out of their own pockets, flying people there, flying people back. We have forgotten about our resource. Our Black millionaires and performers, our basketball players and sports folks, if they would create a pot of money, Juneteenth could be financed just by Black people. We really need to start thinking about collective wealth, collective growth. It’s like one of the seven principles of Blackness and Kwanzaa.”
And Juneteenth truly is a community celebration, primarily powered by volunteers. And the Juneteenth Committee is still looking for them.
“If people want to volunteer or get further information, they can go to www.juneteenthmadison.com, www.madisonjuneteenth.com or the regular website, which is www.kujimcsd.com,” Peralta said. “There you will see a link at the top which says ‘Volunteer.’ And then there is a green button after that that says ‘How to Volunteer.’ There are different areas such as the set-up and tear down, help with the clean-up and information booth and also helping with the Children’s Tent. They can enter their information there. And they will get a free t-shirt and we will feed them and thank them from the stage as well.”
While there are approximately seven Juneteenth celebrations planned in the greater Madison area, including Fitchburg and Sun Prairie. But there is only on original Juneteenth celebration. Come on down to South Madison and Penn Park for a day of celebrating all of our freedom.