1st Juneteenth Program Held At Weequachic High School In Newark

Newark NJ

19 June, 2022

7:00 AM

Description

NEWARK, NJ -- Students and staff at a high school in Newark celebrated its first Juneteenth program earlier this week. The inaugural ceremony was held at Weequahic High School on Friday. It included student performances, speeches, and the raising of the Black Liberation Flag. Bashir Muhammad Ptah Akinyele, a history and Africana Studies teacher at the school who helped spearhead the event, offered some background about the meaning of the flag. He explained: "The Black Liberation flag was created by the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL) on August 13, 1920 during its month-long convention at Madison Square Garden in New York City. The UNIA-ACL was founded by the Honorable Marcus Mosiah Garvey. He was a Blackman from Jamaica. The flag was established in 1920 by members of the UNIA in response to a racist song that became a hit around 1900 called, 'Every Race Has a Flag but the Coon.' This song has been cited as one of the three songs that 'firmly established the term coon in the American vocabulary.'" According to the UNIA, the three colors on the Black Liberation flag represents: Red: the blood that unites all people of African ancestryBlack: Black peopleGreen: Mother Afrika Akinyele continued: "The flag later became a Black nationalist symbol for the worldwide liberation of Black people. As an emblem of Black pride, the flag became popular during the Black Liberation movement of the 1960s and early 1970s. In 1971, the school board of Newark, New Jersey, passed a resolution permitting the flag to be raised in public school classrooms. The first school district to do so in America."HISTORY OF JUNETEENTH Akinyele also offered some background about the history of Juneteenth. As he explained: "June 19th has been designated as Juneteenth (Freedom Day) by our Black brothers and sisters. We at Weequahic High School will stand in solidarity with the African / African American community in recognizing Juneteenth. While we all acknowledge the holiday Juneteenth, we must invoke Black history to give us a clear understanding on the inspiration behind the struggle to make Juneteenth a national holiday. "Juneteenth (short for "June Nineteenth") marks the day when federal troops arrived in Galveston, Texas in 1865 to take control of the state and ensure that all enslaved Black people be freed. The troops' arrival came a full two and a half years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. Juneteenth honors the end to slavery in the United States and is considered the longest-running African American holiday in America. "In 1979, Texas became the first state to make Juneteenth an official holiday; several others followed suit over the years. In June 2021, Congress passed a resolution establishing Juneteenth as a national holiday; President Biden signed it into law on June 17, 2021. It became an official federal holiday in the United States. "Like many aspects in American and world history, African people's contributions in history are either intentionally omitted or marginalized as footnotes in history. The Black history behind the struggle for pride, power, justice, equal rights, and freedom for all oppressed groups has been reduced down to the back shelves of history. As a consequence of this forgotten history, folks have forgotten about Black people in America struggling against slavery white supremacy, systematic racism, and monopoly capitalism with blood and sweat to create a safe space for Black freedom and the freedom for all marginalized groups in the United States (i.e., Indigenous People, Latinos, Asians, women, and the LGBTQ community, etc.) oppressed due to their non-European race, gender, or sexual orientation. "As a result of the Black liberation movement of the 1950s through the early 1970s, America's racist caste system had to make concessions to the African American community for a minute. White supremacy and systematic racism allowed some Black people into mainstream society. With that said, we still have a long way to go for total independence and self-determination. The struggle continues for us Black folks to enjoy and exercise justice, freedom, equality, pride, and equal rights." Send local news tips and correction requests to [email protected]