For the second consecutive year, community members will celebrate Juneteenth with a Ward 7 parade that starts at a local church and ends at Fort DuPont Park with a community picnic and go-go music.
This walk preceding the parade will take place in coordination with “Opal’s Walk for Freedom,” a 10-city celebration of the woman who, just years prior, marched for Juneteenth’s designation as a federal holiday.
“She really wanted to do this back when President Obama first became president in 2008,” said Pastor Kip Banks about his maternal cousin Dr. Opal Lee, the retired teacher and activist known to many as the “Grandmother of Juneteenth.”
On June 17, 2021, Banks stood alongside Lee as they watched then-President Joe Biden sign into law the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act, which officially made Juneteenth a federal holiday. Banks said that moment culminated years of organizing on Lee’s part, including a months-long walk from Fort Worth, Texas to the nation’s capital and her promotion of a Change.org petition.
“In 2016, [President Obama] was leaving,” Banks told The Informer. “She was 89 years old and she says, ‘Well, you know, I’m not through yet. I’m going to start walking to D.C.’ and she began to walk to D.C. in 2.5 mile increments.’ When she did come to D.C., she would stay with me and my family, and we also walked with her.”
On June 19, 1865, 2,000 Union troops arrived in Galveston Bay, Texas and told more than 250,000 enslaved Africans that they had been freed.
Nearly three years earlier, President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation secured freedom for enslaved Africans in states under Union control. As a Confederate stronghold in a remote area, Texas maintained chattel slavery for at least two more years. However, General Order No. 3, delivered by Gen. Gordon Granger, abolished the institution.
On June 19, 1866, Galveston, Texas hosted the first Juneteenth celebration, initially called Jubilee Day. In the decades to follow, Black people throughout Texas and other parts of the United States continued to commemorate Juneteenth with church services, parades and other celebratory gatherings.
Banks, the great-great-grandson of an enslaved African-American, one of several who learned of their freedom in Galveston Bay, will give the opening prayer that will kick off the walk at East Washington Heights Baptist Church.
He said Juneteenth, and Lee’s fight for Juneteenth’s recognition, has even more relevance during the second Trump presidency.
“Indeed, statehood for D.C. is a part of her platform. Affordable housing has always been a part of her platform,” Banks said about Lee. “It hurts my heart what is happening in D.C., and we as a people have got to fight. Historically, Juneteenth’s not just a celebration. They have a sermon. They celebrate with strawberry, soda and pies and cakes and barbecue, but then they would also rally and talk about what needed to be done so that our people could be made whole.”
Earl Williams Reflects on a Vision Turned into Reality
For six months, a committee of nearly two dozen people gelled together plans for the second annual Ward 7 Juneteenth Parade, all while working on the walk with Unity Unlimited Inc., a Fort Worth, Texas, nonprofit founded by Lee and her granddaughter Dione Sims.
Parade founder and chair Earl Williams called the event more organized than Juneteenth functions held in the past.
“You have to sign a big questionnaire for the city. Then you make a presentation to the Mayor’s Special Events Task Group,” Williams told The Informer. “Every department in the city is in that room. You make your presentation, and each one of them goes around and says, ‘I have no questions,’ or they have questions about how things are going to go. Then they all have to vote on that, and we have to get approval.”
When revelers descend upon East Washington Heights Baptist Church on June 19, they will take part in a 2.5-mile walk that, in coordination with “Opal’s Walk for Freedom,” starts at the church and ends at Fort DuPont Park.
An hour later, the parade will follow, starting from the church and continuing along Branch Avenue, before entering Randle Circle and ending near Fort DuPont Drive SE. Along the way, they will watch Mama Ayo Handy-Kendi pour libations in honor of the ancestors.
For Williams, it was crucial to go through the proper channels.
“We wanted to set a foundation so that 50 years from now, the parade is going on,” Williams said.
Williams told The Informer that he conceptualized the Ward 7 Juneteenth Parade in 2022, after several years of attending the Palisades Parade with his late wife, former Ward 7 D.C. State Board of Education Representative Karen Williams.
“I didn’t go one year, and some of my neighbors, when they came back, they mentioned to me….how come we don’t have a Juneteenth parade?” Williams said. “That gave me the idea. It wasn’t my original idea, but I decided that I could get it done.”
On June 19, revelers will get to see artwork from the youth of Project Create. Other sights include beauty queens, dance troupes, drum groups, and Black Greek letter organizations represented among those who are upholding a longstanding African-American tradition.
At Fort DuPont Park, they will groove to the sounds of Top 5 DC and all-women Afro-Brazilian drumming band Batala Washington. As Williams explained, the parade will be a community affair, with Metropolitan Police Department, D.C. Fire and Emergency Medical Services, and U.S. Park Police providing resources.
The parade also has supporters in Ward 7 D.C. Councilmember Wendell Felder (D), At-large D.C. Councilmember Robert White (D), Penn Branch Community Association, Advisory Neighborhood Commission 7B, Marshall Heights Community Development Organization, and Fairlawn Citizens Association, among several others.
“Last year, we had 36 organizations in the parade,” said Williams, a longtime Hillcrest resident. “This year, we have over 60, and we had to cut it off because we didn’t want to have a five-hour parade. It’s really going to be a really nice parade. We want a lot of people to line [up along] Branch Avenue and just enjoy themselves.”
Williams also credited “a slew of volunteers,” including his son Brian Williams, lead organizer Toya Carmichael, volunteer committee co-chair Naprisha Taylor, fundraising chair Brandon Scott, participant committee chair Tommy Ballard, along with Ebbon Allen, Xavier Johnson, Travis Swanson, Byron Gibson, Antoine Jordan, Adondra Woods and Patrica Donkor.
He also credited Safeway for their donation of the food, as well as Aetna and CareFirst, both of whom he said led by example when others wouldn’t.
“We didn’t get the corporate buy-in that I thought we were getting,” Williams told The Informer. “I think it’s due to this [Trump] administration’s attitude toward anything that doesn’t fit their narrative. I think businesses were just afraid to pull this like we should be.”
The Ward 7 Juneteenth Parade: A Necessity Now More than Ever
Carmichael, a District resident of more than 20 years who lives in Benning Ridge, said the second annual Ward 7 Juneteenth Parade will be the moment that turns into a movement, especially amid an online war brewing between African Americans and Black people of other nationalities and ethnicities.
“We just have to lock in and focus,” Carmichael told The Informer. “Stop fighting with each other. Stop picking sides and picking cliques and really think about what are the big issues. People are relying too much on social media. We’re not really getting together face to face with folks.”
When the Ward 7 Juneteenth Parade kicks off with the Opal’s Walk for Freedom, District celebrants will spend an hour marching in solidarity with others acting similarly in Fort Worth, Chicago, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, Honolulu, Detroit, and St. Paul, Minnesota. Evanston, Illinois, and Grant’s Pass, Oregon.
Such coordination, Carmichael said, sends a statement.
“We’re trying to take over the algorithm with our messaging,” Carmichael told The Informer. “Just like we did with the George Floyd protest, the Black Lives Matter protest, and the No King’s rallies. That’s what helps people to feel connected and know that they have support and there’s resources that they can use at home.”
As a youngster in Lynwood, California, Carmichael grew up hearing stories about racism her father faced while fighting in Vietnam with the same last name as the man now known to many as Kwame Ture. She also lived on the same block as Black Panther Party co-founder Bobby Seale, who she said taught her and her friends about the movement for Black self-determination.
By the time she met Seale, Carmichael had already been immersed in a local culture where Juneteenth and Black History Month celebrations were par for the course.
“We used to reenact civil rights marches and we would make our signs and we would march through our school singing freedom songs,” Carmichael told The Informer about her childhood. “That would be the start of our Black History Month assemblies. Juneteenth is very similar. We would have parades and concerts in the town I grew up in.”
In a twist of irony, Banks didn’t have such an experience while living on the west coast, despite coming from a family directly affected by Juneteenth.
“This is a major issue,” Banks said. “We didn’t talk about slavery. We didn’t talk about any of it. This highlights why Juneteenth is so important.”
For Banks, when it comes to Black people, Juneteenth should take precedence over the America 250 celebration.
“The Fourth of July is hollow for us,” Banks said. “We have to embrace Juneteenth, because we’ve got to teach the truth about slavery. What we see happening today with inequality, with poverty, with the unaffordability — all the result of slavery. Even in the trauma, the mental illness.”
Banks, who counts Frederick Douglass and Dr. Eddie Glaude among his favorite scholars, emphasized the importance of reckoning with the past to create a better future.
“Juneteenth presents an opportunity for us to delve into our family histories and to discover the truth about our ancestry,” Banks told The Informer.
Williams said Juneteenth allows him to take stock in what has been accomplished for a people once considered property.
“It may not seem that way in this current administration, but the country, since I’ve been born, has moved in a direction of correcting a lot of the mistakes this country has made when it comes to racial relations and people of color,” Williams told The Informer. “Celebrating Juneteenth, just like we celebrate the Fourth of July, are both about freedom. Both should be respected and celebrated.”
