ITHACA, N.Y. — Each year a celebration of Black joy and history has taken place on the streets of Ithaca’s southside neighborhood.
The Southside Community Center has made it an annual tradition to celebrate Juneteenth. The holiday takes place on June 19 and marks the day the last group of enslaved Black people living in the U.S. were freed after receiving news of the Emancipation Proclamation, which had abolished slavery. The news came in 1865, two years after the Emancipation Proclamation had been signed. The day was made a federal holiday in 2021.
This year, the Southside Juneteenth celebration took place on Saturday, June 20, but the events were not limited to the weekend. On Friday evening, a gospel concert took place at the St. James AME Zion Church. Meanwhile, two dance groups — the Southside Panthers and the GIAC Jumpers steppers — performed on the Ithaca Commons.
The events on June 19 closed out at K-House, where Southside hosted the third annual Juneteenth Jubilee.
Ithaca Voice photographer Casey Martin attended and documented the event.
While the Juneteenth celebration has been organized annually in recent years, a previous version of the festival, then known as the Wheat Street Festival, has been going on for much longer, Matos said.
Ira McKinley, a lifelong member of the community and award-winning documentary filmmaker, said the celebrations date back three decades. He recalled the houses where people DJ’d back in the day.
McKinley took video of the celebration for Southside and spent the days before the celebration putting up flyers throughout the city.
For Southside Community Center Deputy Director Kayla Matos, Juneteenth signifies the power of knowledge. She also said this day brings to light “many of the pressing concerns within our Black community that doesn’t necessarily get talked about.“
The flyer for this year’s celebration depicts Shirley Chisholm, who in 1968, became the first Black woman to be elected to Congress. This year, the celebration’s theme was improving voter engagement.
Behind the main stage, volunteers worked to register new voters. Matos said the theme was spurred by the fact that the midterm elections are this year, and with a presidential election coming up in two years, she also hoped 16-year-olds would be encouraged to register.
Matos reiterated the importance of creating spaces where Ithaca’s Black community can be comfortable and be themselves. She said the events “were just another opportunity for our artists and our performers to showcase themselves and their talents, the work that they’re doing celebrating Black excellence, Black love, Black joy.”
For Matos this is especially important in Ithaca, where only 6% of the population is Black.
The celebration included performances from Trew Sudaam, the Don House Jazz Band, and the Breaking Ground Steppers, among others.
The food options included several Jamaican and soul food vendors, whose jerk chicken and baked mac and cheese satisfied hungry families.
Community organizations like the Tompkins County Cornell Cooperative Extension, the Ithaca Community Party USA and the Tompkins County Workers Center also tabled at the event.
One way that the event nurtured this community was through the Ade Jembe Fola drum circle. During the celebration, Jamil Adéwalé Kasumu, the founder and director of Ade Jembe Fola, taught children and adults traditional African drumming, which is used as storytelling devices.
The celebration closed out with a mini-dance battle between young people in the community and a Soul Train line while the festival was wrapping up.
