SARATOGA SPRINGS — A Saratoga Black Lives Matter Juneteenth celebration set for Friday night at the Frederick Allen Elks Lodge was canceled earlier this week after the State Liquor Authority received a complaint regarding the event and the lodge’s liquor license. BLM leaders promptly condemned the turn of events as an act of institutional racism.
“This certainly must be an inflection point,” BLM stated in the press release Wednesday. “Day after day, year after year, generation after generation, the Black community in the city of Saratoga Springs has had to fight to co-exist with white people and it comes to an end today. From this point on there will be no placating, no bowing down, no asking for permission for the rights afforded to everyone else but our people. Saratoga BLM will continue to organize and resist any effort to destroy our people. We will not cower in the shadows and accept this type of attack, for this summer we will be free.”
Frederick Allen Elks Lodge Exalted Ruler Thomas A. Davis said in an email that the lodge received a call from the State Liquor Authority on Wednesday regarding an anonymous complaint about the Juneteenth event and asking for details about the event. Following the conversation, Davis said, the lodge decided to rescind its offer to host the event until they knew more about what was going on.
According to Alcoholic Beverage Control Law, a club, which the Frederick Allen Elks Lodge is currently licensed as, can only serve alcohol to its members and guests. A guest is someone “in the actual company of a ‘member’ and who enters club premises on the invitation of such member.” Guests cannot be served alcohol when the member who invited them has left the club premises. The only time a club can serve someone other than a member or their accompanying guests is when it applies for and receives a caterer’s permit allowing them to hold a particular event. The permit allows for serving non-club members or their guests only on the date and time specified on the permit. That being said, the law states that the permit is not required when the event is hosted by a club member.
The complaint came just days after the city received a request from the state Attorney General’s Office to provide more information regarding citations against Saratoga BLM co-founder Lexis Figuereo related to protests BLM was a part of organizing in the city in May, as well as details on the steps the city can take to resolve constitutional claims related to the police department’s actions against protesters during summer 2021.
The Saratoga Springs lodge is named after Frederick Joseph Allen, the first African-American to work in the Saratoga Springs Public Works Department. Then-Exalted Ruler Kendall Hicks told the Daily Gazette in 2021 that the lodge is the only African American-run Elks lodge within 100 miles in each direction.
“We are greatly saddened by the lack of transparency about the complaint, the impact to our young black community seeking a safe place to celebrate [ironically] Freedom, and the sense of implied threat to Frederick Allen Lodge and its membership that we are being closely watched and reported on,” Davis said. “We all lose with this kind of behavior. Let’s do better. Frederick Allen Elks Lodge #609 continues to serve our members AND the community of Saratoga Springs.”
Figuereo said, as one of the people organizing the event, the SLA never reached out to him. He also said BLM and the lodge discussed having an alcohol-free event but that the parties felt in the end it would just be best to cancel the event all together.
“They’ve been over there for over 100 years,” Figuereo said of the lodge. “They’ve already experienced their fair share of problems and things like that within 100 years, so it was set to where it was either we still go with the event, risk the Elk club getting into some kind of trouble, or, like made up trouble, or we decided to cancel the event all together.”
Figuereo said he’s not sure who made the complaint, but that due to the event being canceled at the last minute they won’t be able to reschedule it. The complaint came just 12 hours after the group publicized the event, according to a press release from BLM.
The SLA addressed the situation in a statement Thursday.
“The Frederick Allen Elks Lodge is currently licensed as a club, and as such, cannot serve alcoholic beverages at events open to the public which would constitute a violation of ABC [Alcoholic Beverage Control] Law and could result in disciplinary actions,” the SLA said in an email. “When able and appropriate, such as here, the SLA will proactively reach out to licensees to advise them of potential violations of ABC Law. Upon receipt of the complaint, an SLA investigator talked with the designated ABC officer of the club, the investigator then advised the licensee that alcohol service was not permitted at the event pursuant to their license type.”
This would have been BLM’s fourth Juneteenth celebration. Last year, it was also held at the Elks lodge.
This year’s celebration of the federal holiday was to include free food, a cash bar, local vendors, music and poetry between 6 and 10 p.m., according to a social media post about the event. Juneteenth celebrates the date of June 19, 1865, when enslaved people of African descent located in Galveston, Texas, finally learned of their freedom from the slavery system in the United States, marking the end of slavery in the country.
According to the lodge website, it is hosting a Freedom Music Festival Saturday from noon to 8 p.m. in the backyard terrace at 69 Beekman St. in Saratoga Springs.
