On the evening of Thursday, June 20, the east lawn of Salt Lake Community College’s Taylorsville Redwood Campus transformed into a bustling miniature festival ground for the college’s third annual Juneteenth Freedom Day Music Festival.
With the SLCC sign that sits along Redwood Road providing a fitting backdrop, festival organizers arranged for a stage as well as a gathering of chairs, vendor tents and tables. Around 150 attendees mingled with each other and attempted to find shade from the sweltering sun as they gathered in support of Juneteenth, the country’s newest federal holiday.
Nationally celebrated on June 19, Juneteenth commemorates the day the last enslaved Black Americans learned they had been freed by President Abraham Lincoln’s second Emancipation Proclamation, in Galveston, Texas. Juneteenth also became a state-recognized holiday in Utah in 2021.
“This is when the last slaves learned of their freedom,” said Adam Ibrahim, who got on stage for the festival’s opening remarks. “We celebrate that fact 159 years later here today … let the celebrations begin!”
An echoing round of applause answered Ibrahim’s welcoming statements, as a diverse mixture of SLCC community members and other locals filled the lawn. KUTV news anchor Jamie McGriff was then introduced as the evening’s emcee, a role she fulfilled at the college’s celebration last year.
Black excellence shines
The lineup of performances for this year’s festival included readings of poetry and literary pieces by revered Black American writers such as Langston Hughes and Teresa the Songbird. Musical numbers included performances by the Unity Gospel Choir, the G. Brown Quintet and the Changing Lanes Band, who closed out the evening.
Following the Unity Gospel Choir, Gina Alfred, student affairs coordinator for Campus and Site Services and the former president of the Staff Association, took to the mic. She gave an emotionally charged vocal reading of a commencement address originally given by Dr. Daniel Black at Clark University in Atlanta, Georgia.
Alfred said she mixed some of her own words in with Black’s to make her rendition more applicable to the SLCC crowd.
“Listen Salt Lake Community College, home of the most diverse [student] population, you got Black excellence attending and working here,” Alfred announced. “Some of y’all sitting here — people doubted you. But you’re here anyway. Somebody said, ‘Ain’t no way,’ but Black excellence said, ‘Hell yeah!’”
“Africa is in us,” she said later in her revised version of Dr. Black’s speech. “We are the lineage of royalty, of kings and queens, of resilience and resistance. We epitomize strength and valor. We don’t follow the status quo — the status quo looks to us for influence. We are often imitated, but never, never, never duplicated.”
Vendors at the festival consisted of shaved ice to stave off the heat and an assortment of tents with goods from local, Afro-American businesses. One vendor, Redemption, sells t-shirts adorned with portraits of Black American heroes — like Shirley Chisholm, the country’s first Black congresswoman, who was elected in 1968.
“Our shirts highlight the unsung heroes in the Afro-American and Black communities in the U.S.,” explained Glory Shekinah, Redemption’s owner. Each shirt Shekinah sold at the festival included a postcard with details about the individual and their achievements and contributions to Black excellence in America.
Education and involvement
The 2024 Juneteenth festival represented the third annual celebration at SLCC. The Black Student Union (BSU) and a Juneteenth festival committee co-organized the event.
Campus sponsors included the Dean of Students Office, the Office of Community Relations, the Thayne Center, the School of Arts, Communication and Media, and the office of Student Engagement, Experience, and Achievement (SEEA) – formerly the Office of Diversity and Multicultural Affairs.
Shari-Fa Harrigan, student success specialist at the SEEA and member of both the BSU and Juneteenth committee, said the annual festival is about more than celebration.
“It’s important to recognize Juneteenth in order to educate people and to bring awareness to Black history,” Harrigan said. “But it’s also just to bring community together. When you look at everyone here, it’s a variety of different people … from outside the community, inside the community. It’s [about] the beauty of bringing people together.”
Harrigan added that, despite the anti-DEI bill passed by the Utah legislature this past legislative session, the BSU isn’t going anywhere.
“We’ve always been open to all ethnicities. That’s been one of our biggest policies,” Harrigan said. “You don’t have to be Black or African-American to come to our meetings or our events. It’s never been closed off to anyone and we’re going to keep it that way.”
Involvement in hosting the festival, like involvement in the BSU, was unrestricted. Anyone from the SLCC community was able to sign up beforehand on the official SLCC Juneteenth webpage.
Harrigan added that, as long as the anti-DEI bill doesn’t take funding away from the BSU, the club will continue to plan events and host meetings as they continue to educate and unite the SLCC community while furthering Black excellence at SLCC and in Utah.
The BSU holds meetings throughout the year on Thursdays from 12 p.m. – 1:30 p.m. at Taylorsville Redwood Campus on the second floor of the Student Center, in Room 101-W. They are open to all SLCC students, faculty and staff.
