Community members are invited to a Juneteenth Celebration from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday, June 17, at the Boys and Girls Club, 1600 Walnut St.
Hopkinsville’s Divine Nine — the local representatives of Black fraternities and sororities in the National Pan-Hellenic Council — will host the event to commemorate the national holiday that celebrates emancipation gained by enslaved Americans at the end of the Civil War.
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Among several activities planned for the Juneteenth event, a keynote address will be delivered at 1 p.m. by author and civil rights historian Quraysh Ali Lansana.
Originally from Enid, Oklahoma, he is the author of 22 books in poetry, nonfiction, children’s literature and literary anthologies. As the director of the Center for Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation at Oklahoma State University in Tulsa, he has worked to “plan for and bring about transformational and sustainable change, and to address the historic and contemporary effects of racism.”
In a 2022 story published by The Conversation, headlined “How a poet and professor promotes racial understanding with lessons from history,” he said, “I am a historian and a political junkie. I think that my love for history and connecting — I call it the tenuous tether of yesterday and today — actually was born in my small town, Enid, Oklahoma. I grew up in a lower-working-class Black, very deeply segregated town where I did not learn much in K-12 education about Black history.”
Born Ron Myles, he is the younger brother of Hopkinsville resident Bonnie Lynch, a retired educator and one of the organizers for the Juneteenth celebration.
The celebration will have food vendors, a cultural festival, music and dancing, and activities such as cornhole. Anyone needing more information should call Lynch at 270-881-2574.
Celebrated on June 19, the holiday marks the day in 1865 when Gen. Gordon Granger and thousands of federal troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, to announce the Civil War had ended and to ensure all enslaved people were freed. Although President Abraham Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation two years earlier, it was ignored by Confederate states and not enforced in the South until the end of the war.
Congress adopted legislation establishing Juneteenth as a federal holiday in 2021, and President Biden signed it into law in June that year. It was the first federal holiday established since Martin Luther King’s birthday in 1983.
Jennifer P. Brown is co-founder, publisher and editor of Hoptown Chronicle. You can reach her at editor@hoptownchronicle.org. Brown was a reporter and editor at the Kentucky New Era, where she worked for 30 years. She is a co-chair of the national advisory board to the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, governing board past president for the Kentucky Historical Society, and co-founder of the Kentucky Open Government Coalition. She serves on the Hopkinsville History Foundation's board.
