Under the baobab: From MLK Day to Juneteenth, commitment, effort go into making a holiday

“Weeping may endure for the night, but joy comes in the morning.” (Psalm 30:5)

Good morning, brothers and sisters, Happy Juneteenth, when we celebrate their struggle and mourn the pain of our ancestors.

On June 19, 1865 Union Army Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger came into Galveston, Texas. He and his troops pronounced the end of slavery to the formerly enslaved Africans. It had been over two years since President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation and it was a year before the 13th Amendment abolished slavery in America for everybody, forever. This year, people across the country celebrated with food and festivities, much like the Fourth of July.

In State College on Friday there was a Juneteenth celebration at Sidney Friedman Park, which also commemorated the late Rev. Dr. Donna “Mama” King. The following day the State College NAACP sponsored a celebration at Martin Luther King Jr. plaza.

It reminded me of an earlier time in a different place.

In 1973 I was a freshman at Dutchess Community College in upstate New York. My beloved mentor and teacher, Juanita Allen, was preparing a program to celebrate Rev. Martin Luther King’s birthday. At the time there was no national or local holiday. She asked me to write a poem for the occasion. I wrote, “WE REMEMBER MARTIN.” At the high school, Christine Keyes and I performed it accompanied by Marva Clark on piano. It was a beginning.

We performed it on MLK Day for the next four years until we went away to school. The MLK Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta accepted the poem in their permanent archives. Coretta Scott King came to town to visit and campaign in 1980. (I first met her in Resurrection City in DC in 1968.) She had read the poem and thanked me for it. Through her efforts and the struggle of thousands of others like Mrs. Allen, MLK Day became a federal holiday three years later in 1983. The bill was signed by President Ronald Reagan. The first official celebration was three years later in 1986.

In 1995 I received a call from Professor Bob Leonard at Penn State’s School of Theatre. He asked me to join the faculty as a guest teacher. He was working on a program for the university’s Martin Luther King ceremony. It had been customary to invite a guest speaker for the event. But the vagaries of weather and transportation prevented some of the speakers from reaching Happy Valley in January. The administration, led by Jim Stewart, Tom Poole, and Terrell Jones, convened a committee to plan a homegrown alternative program. Bob and I were asked to produce a stage performance for the event. It was one of my first tasks at the university.

My dear friend, the late Professor Dan Walden, had met with Rev. King when he visited Penn State in 1965. Dan shared with me his experiences and observations with the renowned civil rights leader. I used these, MLK’s inspiring words, my own research and excerpts from my poem to create the text. My friend and colleague Anthony Leach had recently organized Essence of Joy, an internationally celebrated choir which specialized in African American sacred and secular music. Essence was one of the centerpieces of the MLK program. Graduate students including Keegan-Michael Key, Ty Burrell, Cynthia Henderson, Carla Hargrove, and others made up the acting company. The event was a success and set the tone for MLK celebrations at PSU for many years.

This year Congress and the president declared Juneteenth a federal holiday. Though it involved similar commitment and effort, the process was different. The leaders are different — President Biden, Vice President Harris, the 94-year old freedom marcher, Opal Lee. In the end, the objective is the same — freedom and justice for all.