How Brooklyn Celebrated Juneteenth Way Before It Became a National Holiday

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When Brenda Brunson-Bey first moved to Brooklyn in 1984, she met a lot of people who didn’t know what Juneteenth was.

She herself hadn’t known the term until she went to college. Growing up in Augusta, Georgia, June 19th was just “Family Day,” she said — when all her friends and family went to church for pie contests, home-cooked meals and dancing.

“It’s our freedom day,” she recalled her grandmother telling her when Brunson-Bey asked why they were all celebrating.

Now, living in Fort Greene, she and close friend Spring McClendon run one of the longest-running Juneteenth celebrations in the city: the Brooklyn Juneteenth Arts Festival, begun in 2001. And in the three years since the day became a federal holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States, it’s expanded so much the pair are hosting it twice this month.

“There’s so much about our culture to celebrate,” said McClendon. “We can’t fit it into just a few hours, or even two days.”

In past years, the festival happened in the small triangle of Cuyler Gore Park in Fort Greene. Tents and booths of local artists lined the park’s walkways as the sound of musicians and poets spilled out from the stage and onto Carlton Avenue. Each year, according to the organizers, hundreds of New Yorkers stopped by to celebrate Black heritage and the day that the last enslaved people in Galveston Bay, Texas learned they were free.

This year, however, the celebration will first fill the larger Herbert Von King Park in Bed-Stuy from 12 to 6 p.m. on June 15. Then, on June 19, the festivities will continue on Nostrand Avenue in front of the jazz club Sista’s Place.

The two started the festival together over two decades ago as the Cooperative Culture Collective, an organization supporting artists and artisans in Brooklyn that are part of the African diaspora.

Brunson-Bey and McClendon — who have been friends so long they can’t recall how they first met — call what they do “edu-tainment,” art that helps educate people on the history of Black people across the country. The festival hosts performers of all ages and styles on stage, and local artists and artisans fill the surrounding green space with their work.

The pair now knows hundreds of artists and performers in Brooklyn, and they stay up to date on the local bands of the minute. When not wearing Brunson-Bey’s own clothing line, they wear pieces from lines of their fashion designer friends; one of them, Moshood, designed the Commissioner of Cultural Affairs Laurie Cumbo’s Met Gala red carpet look this year.

“We could probably do Juneteenth every day and never repeat an artist,” McClendon said. “There’s something in the water here that brings out creativity.”

One of the festival’s crowd favorites, Javier Gooden , has been sharing spoken-word performances on stage since he was 8 years old, when he started with a monologue depicting Malcolm X. Gooden came back the next year to depict Martin Luther King Jr., and has been a staple act since. He will be back on stage this year, just a few weeks after graduating high school.

“So much of our history has been lost to us,” Brunson-Bey said. “Now we’re finding it again by celebrating and uniting with each other across the nation.”

Both women didn’t hear the word Juneteenth until college. For Brunson-Bey, it was when she met a friend from Dallas, Texas in her first year that she realized her childhood “family day” was not just an Augusta celebration. In Texas, it was called Juneteenth.

“We had been celebrating the same holiday for many, many years without knowing it,” Brunson-Bey said.

McClendon grew up with a small family gathering on June 19 each year, also not aware of the holiday’s national scope. When she moved to New York in the 1980s, she started celebrating Juneteenth with a Brooklyn social group called the “Citchen Kabinets.” Many of the members of the Citchen Kabinets still show up to the festival every year, she said.

Meanwhile, Brunson-Bey had been celebrating informally for years in Brooklyn before she started the first versions of the arts festival in the late 90s, with McClendon to join in a few years later.

“There is so much that this country has done to people of color, keeping our history from us and our descendants. But we have a culture other than slavery and we need to show that to each other.” Brunson-Bey said. “That’s why I got on this, that’s why I stay on it.”’

The two have seen Juneteenth evolve over the years, with their own festival an indicator of the growth. The celebration started with a few dozen people in Brunson-Bey’s then Fort Greene clothing store, and two decades later, the duo now sees hundreds of people roll through each year.

“It is not just our Brooklyn neighbors that come to the festival anymore,” McClendon said. “We have people come from all over the country to celebrate with us, and many have ended up starting Juneteenth festivals in their own communities because of it.”

Though overjoyed that the day has become a widely recognized holiday, both say they are wary of celebrations becoming too commercialized.

“It should not be something people celebrate without knowing what it is about,” said Brunson-Bey. “It has to be about community, bringing our own stories back to us, then presenting them proudly to our community.”

For their festival started in Fort Greene, the community is dedicated to coming out to celebrate each other.

“One year it was pouring rain, but everyone stayed until the sun came out,” McClendon said. “I thought that people would leave, but the sun came out, everybody dried off the stage and the chairs, and we kept celebrating. That’s just how we do it.”

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