'It's About Freedom, for Everybody': Voices From Berkeley's Juneteenth Celebration

Malcolm Perce is just 18 years old, but they have a clear message for older generations to hear on Juneteenth: The Black experience is more diverse than they often acknowledge.

"Juneteenth is not only a celebration of Black people, but it's a celebration of all the intersectional parts of Black history and Black people, including Blasian communities, queer Black communities, Black Latinx communities. So I think that it's important to recognize everyone that's in the community," they said.

Perce, who is genderqueer, knows that personally and was one of several Black voices who told KQED what the celebration means to them at the 35th annual Berkeley Juneteenth Festival, Sunday. The holiday honors the annual commemoration of the end of slavery in the United States.

While other cities across the Bay Area may have celebrated Juneteenth for longer — San Francisco for more than 70 years, and San Jose for more than 40 — Berkeley's organizers say their event's claim to fame is that it is the longest continuously running Juneteenth celebration in the Bay Area.

This year's Juneteenth also comes on the heels of a report by the state's nine-member Reparations Task Force recommending housing grants, state-backed mortgages, higher pay and free health care for Black Californians. It will release a comprehensive reparations plan next summer, as KQED Managing Editor Otis Taylor highlighted this month.

Berkeley also is grappling with its own promises of justice, as it weighs giving priority to housing those with family ties in historically disinvested Berkeley neighborhoods, or those historically displaced by government action, like the Black community during BART's construction.

That's especially key as roughly 2,400 housing units may soon rise up over Ashby BART station, blocks way from the celebration, after Berkeley officials approved needed zoning changes just this month.

The question of how to keep a sharply declining Black population in the East Bay wasn't confined to the halls of government — they were top of mind for Perce at Juneteenth on Sunday, too.

It's important in the Bay Area to remember houseless people who need to be compensated when considering reparations, Perce said, and it's also important to make the Bay Area more affordable so they and their peers can afford to stay in the place they call home.

"I'm very worried. I'm trying to find little crevices in the Bay and just outside of the Bay where housing is affordable for young adults," they said.

Here's what others at Berkeley's Juneteenth had to say.

Edythe Boone

Art is Edythe Boone's passion, and at Juneteenth, she celebrated both her passion and her community. Sunday was the 84-year-old's first time at Berkeley's Juneteenth festival, but her impact has long been felt throughout California.

Boone is a storied artist and community activist, with mural work featured in San Francisco's Mission District, and elsewhere, work highlighted in the documentary "A New Color." She is also the aunt of Eric Garner, who was choked and killed by New York Police Department officers.

His legacy, and many before him, inform her work, she said.

"My ancestors were slaves," she said. "That's why I'm here, and I'm hoping that this world will change into a world that we can appreciate."

Gerald Baptiste Jr.

Gerald Baptiste Jr. has been at the festival since the beginning, and his family has deep roots in the community. His father, also Gerald Baptiste, worked with the Center for Independent Living, an organization that supports people living with disabilities and helped lead the push for the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act.

Baptiste says his father was fundamental in getting the land for the Ed Roberts Campus, a hub for organizations providing services to people with disabilities in the local community right across the street from the Juneteenth Festival.

Baptiste Jr. helped found the Juneteenth festival 35 years ago. “I was born in Texas and they’ve been doing that for over a hundred years,” he said. But when he first came out to Berkeley in the 1980s, Juneteenth celebrations weren’t as common. “To be a part of something that was being basically established on the West Coast was special.”

That doesn’t mean it was easy. Baptiste Jr. remembers there was a lot of back-and-forth with the City about where the event would be. “The city of Berkeley and the politics that existed at that time, did not want us to have a large public gathering outside.” He says it was a struggle to get it off the ground, but eventually, it became the tradition it is today.

Baptiste said the festival didn’t happen last year, or the year before, because of COVID-19. He says, being back now on Adeline Street with his kids and grandkids “is just wonderful.”

Kele Nitoto

Oakland native Kele Nitoto helped usher in Juneteenth with his djembe, a West African drum, by honoring the community's ancestors with his beat at the morning's African libation ceremony.

"It's almost like a prayer before a meal," he said. "We honor the ancestors because the 'most high,' God, is too far away. He's too noble, right? So your connection is those people who have passed on, those people that you respect and love, that you look up to from history."

When asked which of his own ancestors he honored in his heart during that ceremony, Nitoto said he looks up to his paternal grandfather, Charles Hoskins, an activist in Mississippi and a worker who took in neighborhood children to keep them safe.

On Juneteenth, he feels it's important to remember freedom in the context of history.

"We have been out of slavery for much shorter a time than we were enslaved," Nitoto said. "And slavery did not only affect those who were enslaved – that traumatized everyone in the country, especially those perpetrating the evil." That trauma lives on, and so, he said, "this country is in need of healing this trauma."

Janelle J. and Michelle Horn

For Berkeley residents Janelle J. and Michelle Horn, Juneteenth is about coming together to celebrate with people from other cultures, together. But it's also about ensuring the emancipation of enslaved people in Texas and elsewhere are not forgotten.

"We all free now. It's about freedom, for everybody," Horn said. Janelle said, "It's just beautiful to see people out here peacefully."

Janelle said she's glad Berkeley is looking at reparations for residents, but a recently announced housing preference for Black citizens is "setting the bar low."

And a new development announced for the parking lot near Ashby BART station also alarms her due to fear of further gentrification.

Thomas Leonard

Thomas Leonard certainly knows how to make an entrance.

He rode into Berkeley's Juneteenth celebration atop Paco, his steed, shirtless in the sun, wearing little else other than a headdress, a waistcloth and a broad grin.

For Leonard, Juneteenth is a time to celebrate.

"My people were told that they were free," he said. "It's a reminder. I think it's nice to see my people, and all people, get together and celebrate."

Yvonne Cagle

Raised in Novato, Dr. Yvonne Cagle, 64,  eventually made her way to space.

While the NASA astronaut explored the inky dark beyond Earth's atmosphere three times, on Sunday she found herself down on terra firma at Berkeley's Juneteenth celebration.

It's key for everyone, no matter their station, no matter their achievements, to remember those that came before, she said.

"None of us arrived at our destination alone. We stand on the shoulders of our giants, our ancestors. The best way to look to and secure the future is by learning about and being inspired, and innovating, on the achievements and accomplishments of the past," she said. "That's why I'm here on Juneteenth."

Well, she did have one more reason: the kids. She stood at a booth in the sun to teach the younger generations some of the science she took with her to space.

"Crack of dawn, I was here setting up tables and helping out. I wasn't gonna miss it," she said.

Orlando Williams

Orlando Williams grew up a few blocks from the festival.

“Growing up as a kid, we came to it,” he said, noting that now many of people who he used to come with have moved away or been displaced from the neighborhood.

But the festival gives people a reason to get together again. “This is more now like a reunion of everybody coming back,” he said “We haven’t had a chance to gather for a while. And so to come back to this means a lot.”

Williams said he’d like to see the city do more to support South Berkeley’s Black community, and the housing preference policy the City is considering sounds promising. But he has doubts. “The developers are really the ones that have the power,” he said.

Most important, he said, is maintaining Black community space. “A home, a business, anywhere people can gather and feel comfortable,” he said. “We’re running out of them.”

If developments are coming to the neighborhood, Williams said he’d like to see community spaces in the plans that recognize the legacy of the Black community in this neighborhood.

Denzel Herrera-Davis and Lawrence Quincy Milton Jr.

At Sunday's Juneteenth, Denzel Herrera-Davis and Lawrence Quincy Milton Jr. were on a mission to reach out to their community. Herrera-Davis founded Create the Space, what he calls a wellness concierge, centering Black male health by offering clinicians, coaches and peer specialists to help Black men navigate life.

As local government debates reparations for Black Californians, a topic on the minds of some on Juneteenth, Herrera-Davis said he feels concessions are "really, really trivial in the grand scheme of things."

"Yes, we deserve what we deserve, but I'm always going to be of the position that it starts internally," he said. Instead, Herrera-Davis said his group aims at helping people become self-sufficient.

"When we can provide support and structure and safety and all of the basic needs that Black men need to support themselves, they can do better for themselves. They can be better for one another. They can be better for their community, their families, and the household. And then that's how you really start stabilizing a community."

Quincy Milton Jr. said Create the Space "saved my life" through that sense of community. "I think that's a really, really, really major thing that a lot of Black men are missing."

Delores Nochi Cooper

For the past 35 years, Delores Nochi Cooper has shepherded the Berkeley Juneteenth Festival. When it first started, she said, it was as simple as a chicken dinner at Nick's restaurant.

"The next year we'd saved up enough money to have the first annual," she said.

The secret to their success is simple, she said: "We just want people to enjoy the atmosphere, celebrate the black experience, of course, but just the idea that we're inviting the community to come in and partake of our culture."

If one thing has changed over the years, Nochi Cooper said, it's the population of Berkeley, which has seen its Black community drop precipitously.

Still, she said, "we're still here. And we're still celebrating Juneteenth."