On a hot Thursday afternoon, Black Kansas City residents gathered at a park in Midtown to celebrate Juneteenth, the holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the U.S., and remember why the fight for liberation continues.
The Juneteenth cookout was hosted by the Kansas City Defender at Harris Park along 40th Street and Wayne Avenue. The event drew residents young and old to enjoy free food, horseback rides, games, a yoga session, music and a basketball tournament.
Juneteenth celebrates when enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, learned of the Emancipation Proclamation on June 19, 1865, more than two years after President Abraham Lincoln signed it.
The first Juneteenth celebration in Kansas City is credited to Horace M. Peterson III.
The historian and archivist brought Juneteenth to the city’s Historic 18th and Vine District in 1980. He founded the Black Archives of Mid-America in Kansas City in 1974. The first year of Juneteenth in Kansas City, the Black Archives sponsored an exhibit at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art showcasing the original copy of the Emancipation Proclamation.
The Juneteenth cookout included a 3-on-3 basketball tournament. The winning team received a $500 cash prize.
Kansas City resident Queenia Roberts said she thinks about the enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, on Juneteenth.
“It kind of just puts the spotlight on something that we can never let die,” she said. “We can never forget.”
Josiah Kirkwood, Aidan Lee and Cobi Johnson competed in the 3-on-3 basketball tournament.
“It's a good thing to keep us together, and, you know, keep us supporting each other,” Lee said.
“We really all we got most of the time,” Johnson said.
Kansas City resident Stephenie Smith said it’s important for people to come together.
“I think it's also about this reminder of the pursuit that still exists today, in today's political and social climate, of pursuing freedom, doing the hard thing for the good outcome,” she said. “We still fighting, right? It just has morphed into this era's need. But we should always be asking ourselves who needs to be liberated, and from what or from whom? And then pursue it.”
She attended Thursday’s Juneteenth event with her husband, Rodney Smith.
“We have to continue to exude the moral courage to do what's right, even if it's uncomfortable or unpopular,” he said. “We've earned that right, especially as African American people who've been on the front lines of civil rights and fought for these freedoms, literally, and have gone through way worse days, and so we owe it to them to continue to fight well.”
The cookout included vendors like Marqueta Collins with Believe In Your Body Movement Boutique, who was selling T-shirts, and Bliss Books, a local bookseller.
