HOUSTON – For 15 consecutive years, Acres Homes has held its own Juneteenth Parade. The celebrations give residents in the community a time to reflect, as well as celebrate the time when enslaved individuals learned they were free from the shackles of a peculiar, albeit, barbaric institution.
This year’s Juneteenth parade will be held on June 15, at 10 a.m. first kicking off at the Acres Home Multi-Purpose Center on W Montgomery Rd. and conclude at the iconic Greater Zion Missionary Church.
Organizers and partners of the annual Juneteenth parade KPRC 2 Assignments Editor, Amber Baylor spoke with, credit former Houston mayor and Acres Homes native, Sylvester Turner, as being one of the pioneers. However, its main appeal is how the parade highlights and brings a community like Acres Homes together.
“This is my community, my home, my heritage,” Teresa Brewer, president of the Black Heritage Society said. “We’ve been hosting the Martin Luther King parade for over 46 years. And we’ve impacted the community with the celebration of our legacy, our heritage. So we really just want to continue in that vein celebrating freedom, celebrating our rights, and being a part of the community - being a part of the world.”
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As a historian, and someone who graduated from high school in Acres Homes, I will strongly argue maintaining this connection to Juneteenth (also known as Freedom Day) is vital not only to our American History but our state’s, especially. It marks the day (June 19) in 1865 when enslaved individuals in Galveston discovered they had been freed - after the Civil War’s end and two years after President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.
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It wasn’t until 2021, that Juneteenth would finally be designated a federal holiday. And during a time when conversations about race might make people uncomfortable to the point where lawmakers are getting involved, ignoring it, or failing to recognize how it has shaped our country’s history, limits how we can improve our future. Fortunately, that has not been the case in higher education classroom settings, according to Dr. Quentin Wright, President of Lone Star College-Houston North.
“A lot of the information you’ve heard around Critical Race Theory has not made it into higher education yet,” he said. “And all of the [Diversity, Equity, Inclusion] legislation that you’re hearing so much about right now in the news, that’s largely exempts classroom instruction. So for the most part, we can have dialogues about what June 19th means to our students, and to our communities, and to us, as Texas, and as Americans.”
In the more contemporary sphere, Juneteenth celebrations vary. For some Juneteenth parade organizers like Dr. Linda Chandler, with World Sickle Cell Day Awareness, it’s about recognizing the freedom and how that freedom enables communities of color can make a difference.
“Juneteenth has so much more heritage as it has so much more richness,” she said. “A lot of the things that we’re doing, we can be free, we can show who we are and just make a difference in the community, and especially to let the younger people realize our fight.”
“As a father and as an educator, this is data representing just what we are capable of doing,” Dr. Wright added. “If you think about this history of a group of people who became free, without any direction, without any resources, and just see where we all are now, that’s very encouraging. And so that’s the type of story that I want my kids to be able to hear. And I want our students to be able to hear because they’re still facing their own challenges. But when they know the challenges that our ancestors have been through, then they know what they’re capable of doing.”
“My interpretation of Juneteenth is, realizing the struggles and the triumphs of our community, and here we are today,” Brewer said. “And being with the Black Heritage and Society and the Juneteenth Celebration, this just resonates everywhere. We are just a proud people.”
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Having a parade celebration in Acres Homes then, is almost a continuation of that story of overcoming adversity through triumph. And if you have a better quintessential story to represent Houston, I’d like to write about it.
“Acres Homes mean a lot to me because it was one of the first establishments where Black people actually had their own businesses -they had restaurants, they had cleaners, they had small stores because back when I was coming up, we had to have our own,” Dr. Chandler explained. “It’s a staple and we’re very proud of it.”
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“Let me tell you, this is one of the most resilient communities that we’ve ever seen,” Dr. Wright concluded. “Shortly after I became president, the pandemic happened. And so I saw a community that was disproportionately impacted, but it also taught us a lot about what it is that we need to do to help the community remain economically resilient. But it just started with the people.
“A group of people that was going to work together, a group of people that was going to make sure that they lift everybody up. And that’s the type of spirit that we just want to bring forth to all of Houston.”