Culture & Community | Juneteenth | Arts & Culture | New Haven Green
Top: Artsucation Academy Network Founder Dr. Hanan Hameen-Diagne. Bottom: The Juneteenth Flag, which will remain on the Green through the month of June. Lucy Gellman Photos.
“What happens to a dream realized?”
The question lingered over the New Haven Green for a moment, full of possibility. At a podium, New Haven Poet Laureate Yex Diaz held the microphone between her fingers, her touch delicate. “Does it bloom like a flower after rain / Or stretch its branches towards the sun?” she asked in a certain, lilting voice that had music at the edges. Behind her, Ben Haith’s Juneteenth Flag flapped animatedly in the wind, as if it was listening along.
“Does it sing like a choir set free? / Does it shine like gold polished bright? / Maybe, it feeds a thousand hungry hopes. Maybe, it builds a bridge where none stood before.”
That joyful, propitious vision (catch the full poem below) came to the heart of New Haven Monday, as members of the Official Juneteenth Coalition of Greater New Haven joined educators, artists, historians, nonprofit leaders and elected officials to raise the Juneteenth Flag on the New Haven Green. The brainchild of Dr. Hanan Hameen-Diagne, founder and director of the Artsucation Academy Network,, the flag raising formally marks the start of Juneteenth programming in the city, which the coalition has run for the past 13 years in collaboration with the City of New Haven and the International Festival of Arts & Ideas.
During those years, and thanks in part to steadfast supporters from city officials to artists across the region, the observance has grown from a small festival on the upper Green to a days-long celebration over multiple locations, followed by a hip-hop conference at Neighborhood Music School.
Many of the coalition’s members and longtime collaborators are pillars of the arts community, including master drummer Brian Jawara Gray, Stetson Branch Manager Diane Brown, radio personality, activist and arts organizer Marcey Lynn Jones, historian Jill Marie Snyder, artist Tracey Massey, musician and music educator William Fluker, media personality Bud Mench and Hameen-Diagne‘s mother, filmmaker and Wikipedia AfroCrowd CT champion Iman Hameen.
In addition, speakers included Mayor Justin Elicker and Gov. Ned Lamont, as well as staff members from the International Festival of Arts & Ideas and the city’s Department of Arts, Culture & Tourism.
“Part of our victory is here today as we celebrate the raising of this historic Juneteenth flag,” Hameen-Diagne said, speaking among arts luminaries including her father, the jazz drummer Jesse Hameen. “We raise this year after year right alongside the American flag … to show that we are a part of that history. We are a part of this country. We are this country. We are Americans, and Juneteenth is part of American history.”
Juneteenth recognizes the emancipation of enslaved Black people in Galveston, Tex. on June 19, 1865, a full two years after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. The date marked the formal end of chattel slavery in the United States. It did not mark the end of the economic enslavement and disenfranchisement of Black Americans, which continues today.
In 2021, then-President Joseph R. Biden signed a recognition of Juneteenth into law, immediately marking it as a federal holiday. By then, New Haven was home to an abundance of Juneteenth celebrations, from the Green to the Dixwell Community Q House to Goffe Street Park to Whalley Avenue. Five years later, the Official Juneteenth Coalition celebration downtown is still going strong, with a three-day observance filled with joyful and reverent song and dance.
This year, events begin on Sunday June 14, with a Juneteenth Restaurant Week that runs through June 21, and includes dozens of businesses from Island Spice Caribbean and Kool Breeze Jamerican Cuisine to beloved establishments like Mama Mary’s Soul Food on Whalley Avenue and Sandra’s Next Generation on Congress Avenue in the Hill (see a full directory of restaurants here). Just as the Juneteenth events on the Green seek to honor the breath of a diaspora, so too does the restaurant week, with options that range from West African to Ethiopian to contemporary American, with centuries of history in every bite.
Top: Musician William Fluker. Bottom: Historian Jill Snyder, who will lead a commemorative walk around the Green and part of downtown in honor of Lucy and Lois Tritton on June 19. Lucy Gellman Photos.
Then on Thursday June 18, the Coalition will hold an official kickoff at the Flint Street Theater, with a documentary screening of Lisa Molomot’s 2013 documentary The Hill, which chronicles neighbors’ fight to save their homes from demolition in the early 2000s. During those years, the city—then under the leadership of Mayor John DeStefano—used a claim of eminent domain to bulldoze part of the historic Hill neighborhood, and build what became John C. Daniels School of International Communication.
During that kickoff, attendees will also get a preview of the Coalition’s now-annual showcase for young artists, an initiative of Temple University student and musician Namumba Santos who has become part of the next generation taking up the event’s mantle in New Haven.
The next afternoon, Friday June 19, the Coalition returns to the Green for the “Juneteenth Jamboree,” an hours-long celebration with dance, drumming, and its signature Elder Honoring Ceremony. At 4 p.m., the event begins with a commemorative walk around the Green in honor of Lucy and Lois Tritton, a mother and daughter who in 1825 were the last enslaved people sold at auction—as if they were property—on the Green.
“Part of the process was for them to be marched around the New Haven streets while the sheriff shouted ‘Slaves for sale,’” said Snyder, who last year helped organize a service of healing and lamentation for the pair. “This happened on a cold March day in 1825. Just imagine the humiliation that they would have suffered just from that experience.”
For the first time this year, the coalition is also partnering with the Connecticut chapter of the Sickle Cell Disease Association of America, with a commitment to raising community awareness around the disease. Sickle Cell, which disproportionately affects Black and Brown people, is a disease that causes a person's red blood cells to become sickle-shaped, rather than disc-shaped. The change can cause extreme pain and lowered immune response in the body, meaning that a person with sickle cell may have a harder time fighting off infections. The disease is hereditary.
Top: Hameen-Diagne and her mother, Mrs. Iman Hameen, present Gov. Ned Lamont with a full-scale Juneteenth Flag and a request that the artist, Ben Haith, be able to visit him in Hartford to sign it. Lamont, looking into City Spokesperson Lenny Speiller's phone camera, extended that invitation. Bottom: Tiffany Hopkins of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas called working with the Official Juneteenth Coalition of Greater New Haven year after year a joy. "The Festival was founded 30 years ago with the mission of bringing all citizens of New Haven together for a celebration of great art and big ideas, and nothing personifies that more than this Juneteenth celebration," she said.
Both Hameen-Diagne and Chizindu Igo-Amadi, interim operations manager at Michelle’s House, encouraged people to wear red at the jamboree, to both learn about and help educate others on the disease. This month, Igo-Amadi added, the collaboration is part of a wider effort to “Shine the Light” on sickle cell awareness, lighting up buildings and monuments from June 18-21 in partnership with the company Synergy.
That weekend, the festivities continue both on the Green and at the New Haven Museum with events that range from dance to discussion. On Saturday, the Official Juneteenth Coalition will hold its now-annual Juneteenth Village and Marketplace on the upper New Haven Green, complete with a “Next Gen” artist showcase curated by Santos, performances from multiple community artists, and vendor stations from local entrepreneurs (read about last year’s here).
Saturday’s activities have their foundation in the principles of Umoja (unity) and Ujamaa (cooperative economics), fitting for the tight-knit community that the coalition has built over the past 13 years.
Sunday, that momentum continues at the New Haven Museum with “ The Cypher: The Story of Hip-Hop through Movement, Music & Media,” a panel discussion with Hameen-Diagne, choreographer Kim Holmes, WYBC DJ Zeb Powell (Homegirl Zeb), and writer Courtney Brown. For the first time this year, the discussion will double as a sort of prelude to Artsucation’s annual hip-hop conference, currently scheduled for the weekend of July 11. Hameen-Diagne said details on that conference are forthcoming.
McAllister: "I’m very proud of New Haven for being New Haven."
“We’re honored to be able to support Juneteenth this year,” said City Cultural Affairs Director Shamain (Sha) McAllister, who first got to know the Official Juneteenth Coalition through her work with the International Festival of Arts & Ideas, where she worked in community engagement prior to last year. “I’m very proud of New Haven for being New Haven, and not letting what else is going on in the world stop us from our traditions and showing up as ourselves.”
Those traditions shone vibrantly Monday, from Diaz’ question of “What happens to a dream realized?” (the piece, she explained, is meant to turn Langston Hughes’ poem “Harlem” on its head) to Fluker’s soaring take on “What A Wonderful World,” played on a sun-kissed trumpet as Haith’s red, white and blue flag rose on the Green’s flagpole.
The flag is rich in symbolism: there is a five-pointed star for the “Lone Star” state of Texas, an arc depicting a new and promising horizon, and red and blue blocks of color that reaffirm the painful and also profound history of the Black descendants of enslaved people in America.
Keeping his comments short, Elicker pointed to the significance of observing Juneteenth during America’s semiquincentennial year, and particularly in the face of a federal government that is actively rolling back vital civil rights legislation and supporting partisan redistricting efforts that directly disenfranchise Black voters. Jumping from June 1865 to New Haven’s present, he stressed the importance of recognizing and celebrating the holiday, as both a space of joy and one of resistance.
“We’ve come so far since that moment, but we still have more work to do, especially in today’s day, when the federal government is working to undermine some of this work … and take away the values that we as a community, as a country, have worked to hold dear,” he said. “We are supporting our community in every way we can.”
In a short interview following the press conference, Hameen-Diagne said that she credits the event’s success, in part, to the strong focus on the community that the coalition has built and nurtured over the past 13 years. In the midst of a national and legislative landscape that can feel overwhelming, she remains fiercely dedicated to the work, reminded of the power of change at the local level.
“For me, what happens on that [national] level doesn’t dictate what we do on a daily basis,” she said. “We only take control of what we can take control of. When you see me out here doing this work, it’s about all of us. It’s about all of us leading wherever we are. One person can’t stop us. This is our culture!”
“I see this as just doing what I’m supposed to do,” she added. “People talking about dying for the struggle. No. We are gonna live for the struggle.”