Gatherings, Lighting Candles Highlight Juneteenth

Two public gatherings as well as candles lighting porches and driveways are scheduled celebrations of Juneteenth in the Baton Rouge area.

The Community for Drugs and Violence will host a celebration, June 12 at Scotlandville BREC Park beginning with registration at 8 a.m. and a walk at 9 a.m. Entertainment will follow until 1 p.m.

One week later, on June 19, which is the actual celebration day for 2021, a motorcade will gather at 10 a.m. at Memorial Stadium followed by a celebration at Gus Young Park.

Also, Baton Rouge resident Richard Brazen is asking residents to light candles either on their porches or if their house sits away from the road at the end of their driveways beginning at 8 p.m. June 19 “to show support for Black people and their freedom.”

Civil rights activist Sadie Roberts-Joseph founded Juneteenth in Baton Rouge several years ago. Roberts-Joseph, the founder of the African-American Museum in Baton Rouge, was murdered by Ronn Belle, who was her tenant at the time, in July 2019.

Roberts-Joseph, who was 75 at the time of her death, founded the Odell W. Williams Now and Then Museum of African American History, which has since become the African American Museum.

Brazen said the idea of lighting candles surfaced in 2020 in a meeting he was attending. 

“We were talking, trying to figure out what we can do to celebrate Juneteenth,” said Brazen, who is Caucasian and a native of Vacherie. “A person said ‘why don’t we light a candle’ and it just took off.”

The group started calling churches and other organizations to encourage their members to participate. Brazen said the first year was a success and is hoping for more participation this year.

Groups supporting the effort include Together Baton Rouge, the City of Baton Rouge, the Interfaith Federation and Unitarian Church.

“More groups are doing it this year,” Brazen said. “People have been emailing people all over the country. It’s a non-threatening way of supporting the idea.”
Juneteenth is the oldest nationally celebrated commemoration of the ending of slavery in the United States.  Dating back to 1865, it was on June 19 Union soldiers landed at Galveston, Texas with news the war had ended and the enslaved were free. 

The landing was two and a half years after President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation,  which had become official Jan. 1, 1863.