At the Tabernacle Flag Pole in Oak Bluffs, Islanders gathered at noon Wednesday for a flag raising ceremony marking Juneteenth, the national holiday that celebrates freedom and honors the history and culture of African Americans.
The flag itself has an arc of red on the bottom half and blue on the top half, with a white, bursting star in the middle, a symbolic representation of the end of slavery in America and a new horizon for the Republic. The words “June 19, 1865” commemorate the day that the Union Army Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger rode into Galveston, Texas, two years after the Emancipation Proclamation and two months after the end of the Civil War, and finally made it clear to enslaved African Americans far from the battle lines that they were indeed free.
The day has gained significance through the decades. And for nearly 30 years now, Black communities around the country, including here on the Vineyard, have held flag-raising ceremonies on Juneteenth in celebration of their freedom. The day was first declared a federal holiday in 2021.
Juneteenth celebrates Black freedom, but it is most definitely a day for all of us, no matter our ethnicity or race, to reflect on the promise of equality in America and the extraordinary challenges we face as a country in living up to that promise.
Here on the Island, the celebration will unfold over several days and into the weekend with music, such as the Gospel Brunch in Edgartown, and artwork featured at Black-owned studios in Oak Bluffs, several public speaking series, and a host of exhibits on African American history at the M.V. Museum in Vineyard Haven, and all along the African American Heritage Trail. All of these opportunities can be found in the listings in our Calendar section, and in our Community section this week is a feature story about the museum exhibit on the maritime angle of the Underground Railroad, a network of people and places that were part of the history of emancipation.
You can read about many of these events in our Vineyard Visitor magazine, which offers a handy map to find your way, and is available free around the Island, or right here in our offices at 30 Beach Road, Vineyard Haven. Please come by and pick one up.
Next week, we are proud to launch a monthly column in The Martha’s Vineyard Times to be written and curated by our colleague Sharisse Scott-Rawlins titled “Voices by Sharisse,” which will explore stories of diversity on our Island.
You will be reading a lot more from Scott-Rawlins in The Times as she shares stories that celebrate the Island’s Black community and the many other facets of diversity, including our vibrant Brazilian immigrant community and the Island’s native people, the Wampanoag, a name that means “People of the First Light.”
In Scott-Rawlins’s essay about the Oak Bluffs stretch of shoreline known as Inkwell Beach, she wades into the history and shares her deeply personal connection to one of the country’s last remaining historically Black beaches, and what it has come to mean to her family and community.
In the current Vineyard Visitor magazine, you will find the African American Heritage Trail with various sites, including the home of famed Harlem Renaissance author Dorothy West, which are all marked for their significance and historical importance. And as you set out on the trail this Juneteenth, you can find out more about the Martha’s Vineyard Black-Owned Business Directory, an invaluable tool for navigating the Island and all that it has to offer.
I bring all of these parts of our coverage up because they are part of a concerted effort at The MV Times to embrace — and celebrate — the growing diversity of the Island and to celebrate the rich history of African Americans in our community.
It is a history that surrounds us every day. The flag-raising ceremony this week in Oak Bluffs took place amid the Campground, a neighborhood of small cottages, sometimes referred to as gingerbread houses, clustered around the Tabernacle. The neighborhood owes much of its rich history and unique architecture to the “camp meeting movement of the 19th century,” according to the Martha’s Vineyard Camp Meeting Association. At The MV Times we are dedicating ourselves to sharing these stories, and embracing this part of our shared history on the Island.
Juneteenth is a time for the whole Island to ponder the meaning of freedom, and to recognize that the flag ceremoniously unfurled on this day can unite us all.
