Weekend Juneteenth participants encouraged by community response in Southwest Georgia

ALBANY – Following a weekend of vigils, rallies and protests related to Black Lives Matter and the call for police reform, members of groups responsible for the events, held as part of a weekend Juneteenth celebration, say they were encouraged by the community response.

“We had a healing event,” Dedrick Thomas, a board member for SOWEGA Rising, a sponsor of the weekend events, said. “You hear so much about protests and equate that with riots. That’s not always the point. Most of those people that riot are not there to protest anyway. They are there to riot and break some windows and steal some stuff. A lot of times those two groups get lumped together and they are completely separate.

“One thing we were so happy about all of our events this weekend was that everything was peaceful. Our Friday night candlelight vigil was strictly for healing. We had no protesting, no rallying, no chanting.”

Thomas also emphasized that members of many religious groups were a part of the weekend, with prayers being offered by members of Muslim, Christian and Jewish houses of worship in the community.

“We had a multiracial crowd,” he said. “You had white people marching. You had black people marching. Hispanic people marching. Young people marching and old people marching with their walking sticks.”

Michael Harper, another SOWEGA Rising board member, said many weekend event attendees heard of Juneteenth, the annual recognition of the announcement in Texas that slavery had been abolished in the United States, the final Southern states to receive the notice, for the first time.

“I think people were educated; there were people that did not know what Juneteenth really meant,” he said.

Harper, a local historian, read the names of 19 individuals whose only acknowledgment of having been slaves was the names he found on their headstones. He said that by next year’s Juneteenth celebration, he wants to see some formal recognition of their existence as slaves who lived and died here.

“I think Friday and Saturday’s events were the most integrated events to happen in Albany in a long time,” he said. “I’m not counting MLK celebrations, where people feel obligated to go. They came to this voluntarily. This was a very positive statement about Albany and the direction we can go in solving some of our issues.”

Ward VI Albany City Commissioner Demetrius Young, a speaker and participant in the weekend events, called them “historic.”

“I think it was a historic weekend; it was a phenomenal state of events,” he said. “I think it motivated a lot of things that further the conversation about our racial issues here in Albany.

“I think the biggest thing was to see the number of white people who came out and who participated in those events, from the vigil to the march. It really felt like a community event, not a black event or a white event, a community event.”

The vigil had special significance to Young. It was held in the park named for his mother Mary Young-Cummings a local Civil Rights leader.

“The park where the vigil was held is where I used to live,” he said. “It was a neighborhood then. (This weekend) (i)t felt like a different neighborhood, almost a different atmosphere, to see the diversity in the community and the good vibes taking place.”

(Staff Photos: Carlton Fletcher)
Staff Photo: Carlton Fletcher