Springfield’s official Juneteenth festivities will feature an expanded six-day schedule of events this year, including a talent showcase and display of Juneteenth artifacts, Juneteenth Levitt AMP concert and Noir Art show at the Illinois State Museum – culminating with a parade and festival in Comer Cox Park June 17 and 18, and closing out with a Juneteenth breakfast at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library on Monday, June 19.
The first official Juneteenth celebrations in Springfield were organized in the 1990s by One in a Million, a community center on Springfield’s east side. Springfieldians who had attended the Million Man March in Washington, D.C., in 1995 returned home with a mission to improve their communities, and out of that mission Springfield’s first official Juneteenth celebrations were born. “We’re focused on showing how this community has always celebrated Juneteenth, even before it was a national holiday,” explained Cherena Douglass, who co-founded Juneteenth Inc. in 2020 along with Shymeka Kerr-Gregory. “If Springfield is the home of Lincoln because of the work he did here, then we’re also the home of Juneteenth.”
The scale and scope of Juneteenth celebrations has grown in Springfield and communities around the country, especially since it was declared a national holiday in June 2021, over 150 years after General Order Number Three was delivered in Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865. The following year, 1866, families and communities in Texas gathered for the first Jubilee Day celebrations. As newly emancipated Texans moved around the country they brought with them their Juneteenth traditions, as the day came to be called. For many Black families, over the years jubilee picnics grew into beloved annual events, full of joy and stories and delicious food.
“Oh my gosh I’m dating myself,” laughs Patricia Carpenter, a retired educator and public service administrator who has lived in the Springfield community for 37 years. “Our traditions were ‘shoe-box picnics.’ You put potato salad on ice in a shoe box and fried chicken in foil in a shoe box. Everybody brought something. We couldn’t eat at a lot of places,” recounted Carpenter, who grew up with her grandparents in Arkansas during the Jim Crow era, where gathering in public parks was often forbidden for Black families.
“Our picnics, if it wasn’t in someone’s house or in their yard, they’d just be on the side of the road and everybody brought blankets. You brought a blanket for the picnic, one for the food, but you also brought an extra blanket to roll down the hills with. That’s what the kids would do when the meal was over, they’d wrap up in blankets and younger people, who were courting, would roll down in the blanket together. And the elders would be napping on their blankets at the top of the hill.”
“We’d always buy big bags of ice because we always had homemade ice cream. And it wasn’t electric, it was the kind you stirred. People would take turns stirring and by the time everyone got through rolling down the hill and you were hot and itchy and had grass everywhere, the ice cream would be ready. They’d pass out the homemade ice cream – it was the best I’ve ever had! Oh, it was good.
“It was a grand time,” Carpenter remembers. “And there was always red Kool-Aid. That was a symbol of freedom and resilience, of the blood that was shed to get to this point where we could just eat real food together. Even the red paprika that you sprinkled on the potato salad was symbolic.”
Although Carpenter’s memories of her childhood Juneteenth celebrations were filled with joy, they were not untouched by the realities of living in the Jim Crow South. “When we were traveling and we had to use the restroom we’d have to go in the bushes. The adults didn’t want us to know that we couldn’t go in the public restroom. I never knew that until I became a teenager. When we’d stop on the road I didn’t know that we couldn’t go to certain places. All that was kept from us so it was always just a fun time. I can imagine that it might have been somewhat fearful for the adults at the time, but we never knew that and we thought it was just exciting. All we saw was the celebration we were headed to and getting together with family.”
Carpenter was raised by her grandparents and her great-grandmother was still alive for much of her childhood. “My great-grandmother was born in the late 1800s, so when we got together people would tell stories about just trying to be free and recognized, and the things we could now do that we couldn’t do before, not looking over your shoulder and just glad that we could sing and dance and roll down a hill. I try to share these stories with my children and my grandchildren,” Carpenter said, “so they don’t forget what we used to do, what we still can do and how powerful we can be as one.”
This article appears in Juneteenth 2023.
