The Riverhead community celebrated Juneteenth on Thursday with food, dance and fun at the Butterfly Effect Project’s campus on Main Road in Jamesport.
Juneteenth — also known as Freedom Day and Jubilee Day — marks the date of June 19, 1865 when Union Army Major General Gordon Granger led troops into Galveston, Texas, to inform the people of Texas that slaves were freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. Granger’s announcement came nearly two and a half years after President Abraham Lincoln issued the proclamation.
Juneteenth has been celebrated by African Americans with community gatherings since the 1800s. It was recognized as a federal holiday by an act of Congress and signed into law by President Joe Biden in 2021.
Butterfly Effect Project Founder and Executive Director Tijuana Fulford said the event went “extremely well” and was well attended. Attendees came from as far as Amityville for the event, she said.
“It’s extremely hot, and everyone still came out,” Fulford said. “We had incredible support from the community, from our local officials…It was awesome.”
“Everyone just kind of pulled together to give a love letter to the community. That’s what we wanted to do, and that’s what we did,” she said.
“For me, Juneteenth is not about a Black holiday,” Fulford said. “It’s about coming together in community and reminding everyone how far we’ve come and how far we have to go — but we have to do it together.”
This year’s event was “super important,” Fulford said, because of the anonymous racist and threatening phone calls the organization received earlier this year. Those calls resulted in the cancellation of one of the organization’s events.
“I did have some reservations, but every day, as I got closer, I realized, like, it is what it is,” Fulford said. “And we are not going to not celebrate the right way. So I was excited to do it and excited that everybody came out to do it with us.”
The holiday has been celebrated locally for more than two decades, with events organized by the East End Voters Coalition at Stotzky Park in Riverhead and Ludlam Avenue Park in Riverside. This year was BEP’s second year hosting a Juneteenth celebration and its first time hosting the event at the nonprofit’s 1 ½ acre campus.
RiverheadLOCAL photos by Alek Lewis
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