A group of around 30 people danced on the hot asphalt of the Anacostia Community Museum parking lot Wednesday afternoon, defying the near-90-degree temperature, as the jazz band DuPont Brass performed. Hundreds of others, warier of the beating sun, sat on picnic blankets in the shade or ducked inside the museum to enjoy air conditioning while browsing the exhibit on Black arts education in D.C.
“You won’t break my soul,” one musician sang, sporting an “I Heart Anacostia” T-shirt.
The line captured the sentiments of joy and resilience Anacostia Community Museum Director Melanie Adams said she aimed to put on display at the Smithsonian museum’s Juneteenth Freedom Celebration.
“The whole purpose of the holiday is to bring forward and highlight African American culture,” Adams said. “As you look at Juneteenth, it really is a holiday of resilience, a holiday of survival.”
Juneteenth commemorates the arrival of Union troops in Galveston, Tex., on June 19, 1965, and their announcement that more than 250,000 enslaved Black people in the state were free. It’s long been celebrated by Black communities across the country, but June 19 only became a federal holiday in 2021, when President Biden signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act into law following a national reckoning over racial injustice after the 2020 murder of George Floyd.
But Juneteenth was commemorated in D.C. for decades before it gained official federal recognition. The Anacostia Community Museum hosted Juneteenth celebrations in the 1980s and 1990s. Adams said the tradition died out in the early 2000s until last year, when the museum revived its Juneteenth celebration.
In recent years, Juneteenth events have proliferated. The celebration in Anacostia, a longtime epicenter of Black culture in the city, was one of more than a dozen taking place across the D.C. region on Wednesday.
The nonprofit Honor Flight Network organized a Juneteenth Honor Flight from Atlanta to D.C. to commend the service of Black veterans. Maryland’s Carpe Diem Arts hosted a free Juneteenth drum and dance session to teach the public Afro-Carribean music. The Bethesda African Cemetery Coalition gathered local historians, politicians and performers at Moses Cemetery to call for the preservation of the historic Black cemetery. Alexandria held a celebration in Market Square featuring the Washington Revels Jubilee Voices, who use historical songs and spoken word to express the Black experience.
To kick off the Anacostia event, host Bryant “BMo” Brown led the crowd in applauding historical Black activists and artists such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Langston Hughes, Rosa Parks and Alain Locke. He concluded by commending current and future Black leaders.
“Shout out to the multitude of Blackness that exists in the 21st century,” Brown said. “You are seen, you are appreciated, you are free.”
Brown said he thought hard about the tone he wanted to set, and whether he should delve into the atrocities of slavery or implore people to take action against modern-day discrimination. In the end, he decided to allow Juneteenth to be a day for community celebration.
“I could do soapbox moments and put a whole bunch of pressure on movements and policies that are still affecting us,” Brown said. “But maybe not today, maybe we’ll get back to that work tomorrow. Maybe today we’ll double Dutch and play catch in the parking lot and listen to people perform and celebrate being Black.”
Venesha Jackson, a teacher at a nearby private school, brought her 7-year-old daughter to teach her about local Black history. Jackson looked for Juneteenth events online and chose this one because the museum’s exhibit highlighting the rich history of Black art education in D.C. allowed her to show her daughter exemplary parts of her heritage.
“I want her to have a connection to our history and celebrate the positive things about it,” Williams said. “I liked the idea of this being at the community museum so we could walk through and see the history of the community in a positive light.”
Check out was real simple, can't wait for the tote bag