Edenton's Juneteenth Parade, celebration draws large, diverse crowd

EDENTON — At 9:30 a.m., a half-hour before Edenton’s Juneteenth parade, Roslyn Harris of Edenton was already seated in a lawn chair, waiting for the parade to start.

Harris moved back to Edenton almost a year ago, and June 15th’s Juneteenth celebration was special for her.

“I enjoy this. This is my first year seeing the Juneteenth parade since I moved back,” she said.

Harris said Juneteenth is about celebrating Black history, a subject that is too often glossed over or ignored.

Juneteenth commemorates June 19, 1865, when Union soldiers brought the news of freedom to enslaved Black people in Galveston, Texas — two months after the Confederacy had surrendered and about 2½ years after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves in the Southern states defeated by the Union.

Avilla Warren was also early for the parade. After the last float passed, she said she reflected on the significance of the celebration.

“The parade was nice, a long time overdue,” Warren said. “On Juneteenth, they said we were free, but are we really free? So much can be done. The progress is in the making.”

Warren said she wanted to dwell on the positive aspects of the celebration but felt it would be remiss not to also mention that there is still work for the country to do.

“We don’t hate each other, but you can feel the tension sometimes, and you can see it.”

Warren said she has lived in Edenton for most of her life but went to Boston for a time to work, then came back to Edenton, where she grew up.

“I was born and raised here. They say nothing is like home, so I came back home,” she said.

Warren said Juneteenth, while now a national holiday, is a reminder of what work remains unfinished.

“We, as a minority race, can finally feel a little freedom. But the freedom we want to feel… we are only allowed so much freedom,” she said.

This year’s Juneteenth parade was Edenton’s second. Sponsored by the group Mentees in Motion, turnout for the parade and afternoon celebration at Edenton’s Waterfront Park was smaller than last year’s event, but the turnout was much larger in the afternoon, attracting a large crowd of diverse participants.

The Sons of Confederate Veterans, who support keeping Edenton’s Confederate Monument where it is, at the foot of South Broad Street, manned an information booth on private property next to the vacant Edenton Office Supply building as they have every Saturday for more than a year. The group Vets 4 Vets, however, did not mount a pro-monument demonstration as it typically does on Saturdays.

Michael Dean, spokesman for Vets 4 Vets, said his group came prepared to protest but decided against it when members saw that the Move the Monument Coalition Edenton-Chowan, an organization dedicated to removing the monument from the town’s waterfront, was not picketing.

Rod Phillips, a leader for Move the Monument, said the group decided to “stand down” instead of marring the Juneteenth celebration.

Pastor Jonthan Downing, who co-pastors the Shalom International Church in Edenton with her husband, Pastor Anthony Downing, said she organized the nonprofit Mentees in Motion and organized the celebration. The group is affiliated with Shalom International Church.

She said a numbers came together to make this year’s Juneteenth observance success. Those included appearances by U.S. Rep. Don Davis, D-N.C., and representatives from the town of Edenton, and music from the band Kingdom, she said.

Speakers from the church addressed the crowd, and representatives from local social agencies and vendors were on hand for the afternoon’s celebration. Food trucks and volunteers from Shalom Church made sure no one went away hungry.

“We need to remember that the Emancipation Proclamation was given in 1863, but it was not observed in the South until 1865 when it was announced in Galveston, Texas,” Downing said. “They started celebrating and having cookouts and parties. Then the holiday broke out all over, and it was signed into law. It’s a national holiday, and now you can find it all over today.

“A lot of people are celebrating their freedom and their African American contribution to the United States of America,” Downing continued. “We don’t want people to forget that it’s not a Black thing. It’s about people who come together. It’s about all humanity. It’s a multicultural celebration of African American people who have made a contribution to the new United States.”