Juneteenth Celebration turns 20

By A. David Dahmer

The annual Juneteenth Celebration will be held on Saturday, June 20 at Penn Park. This year, the event which has gained quite a bit of recognition is celebrating its 20th year in Madison.
"Good, wholesome family fun is still needed just as much now as it was 20 years ago; probably even moreso," says Mona Winston. "I'm just really glad that after two decades we are still here to be able to do it."
Along with longtime co-chair Annie Weatherby-Flowers, Winston has been planning the big festival for the 20th straight year. And what started out as a church social of about 1,500 people has blossomed into the largest family-oriented African American celebration in Dane County.
"We started out with less than a thousand people and we're now seeing between 10,000-15,000, depending on the weather," Winston says. "It's a diverse group that comes from all over the community and outlying areas, not just Madison.
This year's theme will be "At Last ... A Change Has Come!"
"With the election and the inauguration, it just seemed like it was appropriate," Winston says.
This will be the first Juneteenth in America held with an African American president. Is this a day and a historic occurrence that Winston ever dreamed that she would see as a kid?
"I never really thought about it too much until I was grown up," Winston says of the election of America's first Black president. "I think I was more excited for my dad than I was for myself because he is 89 now and he has seen so many changes over the years growing up in the South. It was fun watching him watch Obama as he went through his campaign and then became president."
Madison's Juneteenth Celebration is a program of Kujichagulia — Madison Center for Self Determination Inc., founded by Winston and Weatherby-Flowers. The programming, the services, and the performances are carefully planned every year by board members to educate, inform, and showcase the African American community as a whole.
Everybody is invited to the annual Juneteenth Celebration, but it clearly is an African-American celebration and a wonderful opportunity to experience the rich history of African Americans through various forms entertainment, lectures, visual presentation, food, and other activities.
"We really try to educate our community and we always get a very diverse crowd, " Winston says of Juneteenth. "It's a great educational opportunity, but it's also lots of fun. [We have] great food, great music, and it’s very often a chance to see people that many times you haven't seen in a long time."
Winston and Annie Weatherby-Flowers are two of the founding members who have also been co-chairs of the event for that past19 years. "We've pretty much gotten it down to a science and it's gotten to the point where people pretty much call us to have a booth or a presence at the event,” Winston says. [People] who weren't even on our radar at one time and we weren't even on theirs." 
This year’s celebration will kick off at 10 a.m. with the annual parade, which starts in the Fountain of Life Family Worship Center's parking lot located at 633 West Badger Road and goes down Badger Road to Park Street and ends at Penn Park. 
Most everything is the same as it has been in previous years. There will be a basketball tournament sponsored by Neighborhood Intervention Program and Madison Spartans. There will be more than 60 agencies at the event representing the services that they offer.
 There will be main stage activities which will showcase and promote the rich heritage of the community both past and present through performances by community members.  It will provide an arena for young people and adults to share their artistic gifts, to obtain knowledge about, and to experience the many components of the Black experience through family oriented entertainment as well as community vendors.
The Heritage Area will take the attendees back in history with a traditional Juneteenth Celebration from the early 1900s with Richard Scott's Buffalo Soldiers and Roxanne Johnson.
There will be children's stage activities, children's outside activities, a teen tent, and a church tent. Much like every year, there will be the outstanding home cooking from local restaurants, as well as singing, dancing, rapping, and more.
"There's no Health Tent this year," Winston says, "but there will be plenty of health booths within the main tent."
 There will be a softball game on Friday at Penn Park organized by Rev. David Smith (see box in What’s Up section).
The oldest African American celebration in the United States, Juneteenth is celebrated in more than 200 cities. Its named reflects June 19, 1865, the day Union soldiers arrived in Texas and announced that President Lincoln had delivered his Emancipation Proclamation. The date was informally celebrated each year until 1869 and is now a day for African Americans to celebrate their freedom, their culture, and their accomplishments.
"To me, Juneteenth really means freedom and what we always say is that ‘nobody is really free until everybody is free,’" Winston says. "And that means free of everything — drug addiction, homelessness, hunger, lack of adequate medical care."
 The festival also hopes to promote empowerment and self-actualization for children, young adults, and families by exposing them to visual, spoken, and dramatized information and other mediums that showcase the vast contributions of Black people in America.
But after the party is over and everything is cleaned up on Saturday night, how do we get people to keep being positive and active and working towards solutions on a year-round basis?
"It's like Kwanzaa. You start reading more about what the principles of Kwanzaa are and you start living those principles year round and every day, not just in December," Winston says. "What we learn on this day we should try to take with us and add to throughout the year."

If you have any questions about Juneteenth, contact Mona Adams Winston, 239-7707 or Annie Weatherby-Flowers, 358-2872.