Sacramento Juneteenth parade and festival celebrate, educate on Black history
On a Saturday morning 161 years after U.S. troops entered Galveston, Texas to declare that enslaved people across the nation had been freed, the Sacramento community gathered at William Land Park to commemorate and celebrate the event’s anniversary.
The 23rd annual Sacramento Juneteenth celebration put on by the Sacramento Juneteenth, Inc. group filled the park with jubilant festivities and somber remembrance alike on Saturday.
“Juneteenth is a year-round thing for Juneteenth Sacramento, Inc.,” said Gary Simon, founder and executive director of the Sacramento Juneteenth organization. “Juneteenth is not a Black issue, it’s an American issue ... I spoke to the African-American community relative to learning our history, but at the same time, if we all learn a bit of everybody’s history then that gives us all a better perspective and understanding.”
This year’s theme for the festival was “Let’s Talk About It,” spurred by the recent Supreme Court decision in Louisiana v. Callais that weakened a provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
“We got to wake up and then let’s talk about it,” Simon said in a speech opening the festival. “We’re not just going to let the status quo be the status quo, right?”
Black joy and unity
The Saturday celebration kicked off at 10:30 a.m. with a parade through Land Park featuring local organizations showing their support and pride in Sacramento’s Black community.
Young performers with the Confidence Is Everything cheer group and musicians from the Rex and Margaret Fortune Early College High School led a lineup of 15 contingents dancing, marching and riding along the inner streets of the park while celebrants and passersby cheered them on.
Mika Todd attended the Juneteenth parade for her first time ever this year, supporting efforts as a volunteer.
“We got here at like 7 a.m., so we’ve been here through the whole setup,” she said. “It’s so great, they have such a big turnout.”
Todd volunteered on behalf of her job as a team member trainer at the Target Distribution Center in Woodland. Todd said she and her coworkers asked their supervisors if they could represent the company at the festival.
“As a Black woman, (Juneteenth) means a lot to me and my family, just being able to be free and be afforded freedoms,” Todd said. “It’s really important for us to come out and support ... Any opportunity that we have to be able to come out and support our communities, local organizations, even if it was just a handful of us, we always try to show up.”
The parade ended in the center of Land Park, adjacent to Fairytale Town, where a large stage and various stands and food vendors were set up for the main Juneteenth festival.
Sacramento’s chapter of the Buffalo Soldiers Motorcycle Club participated in both the parade and the festival, parking their “iron horses” in the grass behind their educational booth at the park. The group has participated in the Sacramento Juneteenth festival since the fourth annual event in 2007, though they have not come every year, according to chapter vice president Calvin “Redbone” Jefferson.
“We love to ride, we love to educate the public and we love each other,” said Kevin “Big Bucs” Abram, whose nickname among fellow Buffalo Soldiers riders came about for his love of the NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers. “We just want to bring awareness to the history of the United States and that it was not just created without us.”
American history lessons on Juneteenth
Education on Black American history is a core component of the Sacramento Juneteenth celebration, emphasized by the “Let’s Talk About It” theme this year.
The Buffalo Soldiers Motorcycle Club honors the historic Buffalo Soldiers all-Black U.S. Army cavalry regiments who started as peacetime soldiers in 1866 and later fought in the American Civil War and other battles. The regiments remained in place during war and peacetime until the Army was racially integrated in 1944.
Today, Buffalo Soldiers motorcycle groups nationwide focus on teaching Black military history, using their motorcycles to represent the cavalry.
Each member of the club studies a real-life historic Buffalo Soldier and becomes an expert on them, sharing their story to any who ask. Abram, who has been a full-fledged member of the Sacramento chapter for two years, studies First Sgt. Mark Matthews, who was the oldest living Buffalo Soldier at the time of his death in 2005 at 111 years old.
“For two years, I’ve been in this chapter, loving to promote the education,” Abram said. “We talk at schools whenever we get a chance, and then whenever we’re in public and somebody goes ‘What’s a Buffalo Soldier?’ we get an opportunity to let them know who we are.”
The Sacramento Juneteenth festival had a strong, diverse turnout with members of the community of all backgrounds in attendance. Ray Saito brought his two young children, Bodie and Luna, on Saturday morning to teach them this facet of American history.
“They do teach (about Juneteenth) at school, but I wanted to make sure that they know about slavery and the country’s history so that we could avoid similar things from happening in the future,” he said. “Luna is 9 and Bodie is 6, so we’re just little by little exposing them to difficult concepts ... hopefully over time school will help with helping them understand that the country’s history isn’t all rainbows and butterflies.”
Though Juneteenth is considered a celebration of freedom, remembrance of the realities of chattel slavery in the U.S. also sits at the heart of the holiday.
At the Land Park festival, local author and historian Richard Henry set up a sobering exhibition, titled “Forgive Yes, Forget Never.” The display featured a timeline of news clippings, photographs and postcards depicting the transport and sale of Africans into slavery in the 1700s through the lynching of Black Americans as recently as the 20th century.
“It’s important for people to see with their own eyes,” Henry said. “History is words that got accepted and written down, visuals are the first thing you see, they come right at you.”
Though the author has collected historical documents for years, he only put together the “Forgive Yes, Forget Never” exhibition three years ago. During this Juneteenth alone, Henry took his exhibit to four events over three days.
“Understand that (Juneteenth) was when Black folks were freed, but freedom is a constant fight,” Henry said. “It was a fight during the protests in Ferguson, (Missouri), it was a fight during the Civil Rights Movement ... It’s a continuous fight.”
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