Hundreds Gather to Celebrate Juneteenth

From afar, a festival Saturday at Oxnard Performing Arts Center Park appeared like any other with colorful balloons, rows of barbecue booths and young children giggling wildly inside a giant inflatable jumping room.

But up close, this lively little gathering could be seen as the ninth annual Juneteenth Day Celebration, and its reason for being was as much about rejoicing in freedom as it was about fun.

On June 19, 1865, Union Gen. Gordon Granger rode into Galveston, Texas, with the news that legal slavery had ended.

In fact, the Emancipation Proclamation freeing the slaves in every part of the nation had been signed by President Lincoln almost three years earlier. But the news was slow to reach Texas.

Juneteenth Day celebrates that delayed independence.

“We don’t have to fear anyone anymore. We’ve come a long way and we still have a long way to go,” said Andrew J. Rucker, president of the Tri-Counties African American Chamber of Commerce, which hosts the annual event.

Nine-year-old Amaris Coutee proudly stated that the Emancipation Proclamation was a piece of paper with writing on it about freedom.

“It’s all about our culture, and kids need to be exposed to the culture. The past makes us the people we are today,” said Tina Coutee of Oxnard, who was attending the celebration for the first time with her two daughters.

Camarillo resident Nate Pumphrey, 17, attends the festival every year to help her father, Lowell, sell African clothing and beaded earrings.

“I enjoy working at the booth and walking around and hearing the music. I like kickin’ it with people of my heritage. It’s important,” Pumphrey said.

For Buddy Gibson, a co-chairman of the event, the celebration was also about giving residents access to information on school and sports programs, health and safety tips and local businesses.

“A main goal of the chamber is to enhance African-American businesses. It’s about being able to do these things now,” Gibson said of Juneteenth Day.

The daylong affair, which drew about 500 people, was dedicated in the memory of Gibson’s wife, Callie Mae, a well-known local resident who was a mother, schoolteacher and the driving force behind the start of girls’high school basketball in Oxnard.

People who went to the celebration took turns singing karaoke and listening to live musical acts. They picnicked on ribs, hot links and sweet potato pie and shopped for colorful frocks, delicate figurines and handmade hats and dolls.

And plenty of people gulped down cans of red soda--a beverage with a rich history on this independence day.

The way Rucker tells it, when Gen. Granger told the slaves they were free, there was no wine to celebrate the occasion, so the men and women picked watermelons and drained the juice to enjoy.