“‘You are young, gifted and black,’ we must begin to tell our young. There’s a world waiting for you. Yours is the quest that’s just begun.” — Nina Simone
“This holiday, Juneteenth made me see myself. It made me ask hard questions about where I came from and what was stolen from us,” Greenport High School Junior Faith Welch told a crowd gathered in Greenport’s Mitchell Park after the second annual Juneteenth parade through the village on Saturday. “But it also gave me something back. It gave me pride, it gave me purpose, and it gave me power.”
Ms. Welch’s guiding hand helped shape the festivities throughout the village that day, in a celebration themed “Having Their Say: What Freedom, Equality and Justice Means to Them,” focused on the voices of youth on the North Fork.
But between organizing a national youth chapter of Coming to the Table, an organization working toward racial healing in this country still deeply divided by the legacy of race-based slavery; winning the Princeton Prize in Race Relations; planning the festivities and finishing up the school year, Ms. Welch showed up for a joint Greenport Village/Southold Town Board meeting Thursday evening to share a harrowing experience she and her boyfriend went through two weeks ago.
They had just gotten into an Uber outside the King Kullen grocery store in Cutchogue, on their way to the Strawberry Festival, when Southold Town Police pulled over the car and began questioning them in response to an unfounded complaint that suspicious people matching their description were attempting to break into cars in the grocery store parking lot.
“Despite all the accolades attached to my name, none of them shield me from being a target of this country’s deeply rooted culture of racism,” Ms. Welch told the crowd in Mitchell Park. “Just two weeks ago, I was pulled over by the police alongside my boyfriend, Jon Luc, simply for existing.”
While Ms. Welch told the boards that the officers were kind and apologetic, and said they “understood how bad this looked,” she asked that there be consequences for people who make unfounded 911 calls.
“We were doing nothing wrong, yet someone felt entitled to call the authorities on us,” she said. “That’s racial profiling, and the fact that people feel empowered to make reckless, racially motivated calls that put innocent teenagers in danger, is not just unacceptable, it’s dangerous, and there must be accountability.”
Her comments at the town/village board meeting left Councilman Brian Mealy, the first African-American member of the Southold Town Board, in tears as he recounted his own experiences with racial profiling in Southold. Mr. Mealy, who as Councilman serves as a town police commissioner, said the Southold Town Anti-Bias Task Force was disturbed by the situation and had had a meeting with Police Chief Steve Grattan to discuss police procedures.
“I’m proud of the fierce grandmothers and mothers who told the truth to the Chief and said this was not right,” he said.
“We need to make sure this doesn’t happen,” Greenport Village Mayor Kevin Stuessi told Ms. Welch. “I know how much the Chief cares about this issue, too. We all need to stand up.”
By Saturday, undaunted, Ms. Welch’s voice was strong, and bolstered by the support of the community.
“Even in the middle of all that pain, I found joy, even in the middle of the racism,” said Ms. Welch in the park. “I found community even in the middle of the silence. I found my voice. Despite the hardships I went through in finding myself, I had leaders like Pastor Wimberly, Nicki Gohorel, Liz Welch, and Candace Hall to help me realize that my black is beautiful.”
Pastor Natalie Wimberly serves Clinton Memorial AME Zion Church in Greenport, the stepping off point for the parade and one of the organizations sponsoring the day’s festivities. Nicki Gohorel and Liz Welch are leaders of the North Fork chapter of Coming to the Table, which was also an organizer of the event, and Candace Hall is the Greenport Village Clerk.
The festivities were also sponsored by the Southold Town Anti-Bias Task Force, and they included performances by Batalá, an Afro Brazilian drumming group from Brooklyn and the Harambee Dance Company, sponsored by CAST in Southold. Jackson’s Dance, a group of young students who have been performing at Clinton Memorial’s Juneteenth celebrations for the past several years, also got the crowd on their feet.
The North Fork Arts Center at the Sapan Greenport Theater, just up the street from Mitchell Park, partnered with the event, providing space to exhibit a community quilt stitched together from 70 panels created by members of the community, and banners designed by local students depicting what freedom means to them.
“For some of them, [freedom] meant going back to their home country, which, because of our country’s immigration policies, they can’t do,” said Ms. Welch as she urged attendees to visit the show. “So, even the younger kids know that freedom is uneven in our country.”
Ms. Welch and Jon Luc Jobson, a cellist studying at The Juilliard School, warmed up the crowd at the church with a rendition of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” a hymn of hardship, faith and hope, known in the 19th Century as the Negro National Anthem.
When you feel really low/Yeah, there’s a great truth that you should know/When you’re young, gifted and black/Your soul’s intact...
Although Juneteenth celebrates the day 160 years ago that enslaved African Americans in Texas learned that they had been freed by the Emancipation Proclamation two years earlier, organizers of the North Fork festivities insist that this is a day of freedom for all people from the wounds this country’s legacy of slavery.
Amy Priesing, also a Junior at Greenport High School, took that message to heart in a poem she wrote about abolitionist Sojourner Truth.
“I’m a Latina, and I understand what it means to live on the borders of what’s acceptable for my people to speak, and to be told to soften my words…. to write and have my reality edited for comfort, to walk into rooms where my story is too complex to be convenient,” she told the crowd in Mitchell Park.
“Truth doesn’t ask to be palatable. It demands to be heard,” she added. “Juneteenth is not merely about remembering freedom. It’s about dwelling in it daily, and in every room, especially those not built for us.”
“For black women, a voice sounding wise is more dangerous than one sounding broken,” she added. “This was not an editorial decision, it was erasure. It told black women, then and now, even in freedom movements that your voice must first pass through a white mouth before it is worth hearing.”
“She made space with nothing but truth. She spoke of work, pain, motherhood, the whip, the silence, the Divine, and she said, ‘I had born 13 children and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with a mother’s grief, none heard me,’” she added of Soujourner Truth. “Can you imagine the fire it takes to say that out loud in a room that barely thinks you’re human. Juneteenth is not just the celebration of emancipation, but a declaration that freedom must be demanded, even after the chains fall, because freedom is not the lack of captivity, it’s the presence of justice.”
“Today, in pride and unity, and in power, we celebrate black excellence and resilience and joy,” said spoken word artist Jeremiah King Smith. “Our history didn’t begin with slavery, and it didn’t end with emancipation. We are still here writing our story.”
“Let’s invest in Black futures. Let’s build strong families, strong communities, strong legacies. Let’s love ourselves and each other, unapologetically. Juneteenth is not just a day off. It’s a day to teach others what this day represents,” he added. “Show up for our ancestors and show up for others and for our children.”
Ayana Smith, a 19-year-old student at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte, grew up on the North Fork.
“Growing up here, and don’t get me wrong. I love this town, but it wasn’t exactly the easiest,” she said. “Being one of the only black kids in my grade was very tough…. Being different, especially in a place where you don’t always see people who look like you, can make you feel small, even when you know you’re anything but.”
“I’ve heard everything from ‘you’re exotic,’ to ‘you’re too loud,’ ‘you’re too tall,’ ‘you’re not like other Black people I’ve seen,’” she added. “They don’t understand that it’s not just my appearance that makes me who I am, but my history, my culture and my family. These things were invisible to them. I used to feel like I was drowning, like I was never going to be seen for who I really was. But as I’ve grown older and left to see new places, new people, and many new things, I’ve learned something powerful— that my blackness is not a flaw. It’s not something to be erased, minimized, or hidden. It’s a gift.”
Another young woman, Yvette Branch of Hempstead, gave an incisive sermon as the afternoon sun began to bake a crowd that was still rapt in attention.
“I would like to start off by quoting words from Malcolm X: ‘I will never say that progress is being made. If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six, there’s no progress,’” she said. “What is going on? What is happening in the United States of America? What is happening when our history is being erased from textbooks and curricula? What is going on when the term DEI is now being used with enough malice to be a substitute for the word n—-. What is happening when a little white child praying at a confederate flag is him honoring his history, instead of being indoctrinated with hatred…. What is happening when it’s become socially and politically acceptable to celebrate oppression, but never to reflect on it? America, what is going on?”
“I know that, as a collective, Black folk are tired of fighting… I know that a large portion of the Black community has decided that, after the results of the 2024 election, we’re going to sit back and watch everybody get theirs,” she added. “And while that is a tempting notion — giving in to what we’ve coined as Black fatigue — we need to continue to let the oppressor know that we are not complacent, and we are not content. The ancestors that fought before us grew weary, but they stayed the course. The ancestors that fought before us were ignored, but they stayed the course. The ancestors that fought before us were attacked and bitten by dogs and water hoses, but they stayed the course and when they reached the metaphorical promised land, they said, ‘we have come over a way that with tears has been watered, and we have come treading our path through the blood of the slaughter.”‘
“We’ve come out from the gloomy pass to where we stand at last, where the white gleam of our bright star is cast,” she said. “Don’t let our living generations be the ones to dim the gleam of that star.”
Mr. Jobson, the cellist, capped the afternoon’s festivities with a heartfelt rendition of “The Greatest Love,” a song made famous by Whitney Houston:
“The greatest love of all, is easy to achieve… Learning to love yourself is the greatest love of all…”
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