Juneteenth: Four Galveston Women

2211 Strand Street,Galveston TX 77550

11 June, 2021

Description

View and discuss re-enactments of four iconic women who hail from Galveston, Texas, the home of Juneteenth. After a year of hands-off social distancing, COVID has stimulated our historical memory to memorialize Four Galveston Women: Maud Cuney-Hare (1874 – 1936), Jessie Mc Guire Dent (1891 – 1948),Albertine Hal l Yeager (1897 – 1969), and Izola Fedford Collins (1929 – 2017) for their outstanding contributions. Each of these women were educators, as well as artists. Their life stories interpret America and Texas. Women are the bearers of culture and teaching is kin to preparing others for life, mentoring them to excel in leadership, and how to handle adversity and racism. The re-enactments were directed and performed by Naomi Carrier, author, historian, and founding Executive Director of Texas Center for African American Living History who will also lead discussion. Maud, the daughter of Norris Wright Cuney was born to mixed-race parents, attended the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. While considered privileged, she fought to secure political and economic freedom for people with African heritage. Jessie was a Founder of the second all-black female sorority, Delta Sigma Theta along with four other girls from Texas who were at Howard University in the nation’s capital and participated when White Women marched in the 1913 Parade for equal voting rights. Albertine Yeager’s work was closer to home, by providing a loving home for as many as one-thousand children who were either orphaned or whose mothers required child-care. And in spite of any and all racism, Galveston is the city which magnifies emancipation, on an island of color where people lived and worked together before and after the Civil War. Izola Fedford Collins ends Nia’s series of reenactments by conducting the Galveston Symphony Orchestra to perform her original composition, “Galveston Survives.” Nia Cultural Center educates; conducts Freedom School each summer; has conducted Girl’s Rites of Passage ceremonies, and honors Juneteenth each year. This year, in spite of Confederate Monuments coming down, Nia is building up memorials to African Americans born and bred on the island, who enriched the islands culture, its commerce, and its communities.