Black Ogdenites reflect on significance of first official Juneteenth
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- Members of the Jambo Africa Burundi Drummers perform during the Juneteenth celebration at Weber State University in Ogden on Saturday, June 18, 2016.
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- Bridget Middleton and Marcus Carr are pictured at the Marshall White Center on Friday, June 17, 2022. Middleton and Carr, founders of Growing Unified Development, shared what Juneteenth means to them.
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- An undated photo of enslaved African Americans hangs on the wall of the Marshall White Center in Ogden on Friday, June 17, 2022.
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- An undated photo of enslaved African Americans hangs on the wall of the Marshall White Center in Ogden on Friday, June 17, 2022.
OGDEN — Considered the oldest emancipation celebration in the United States, Juneteenth is the remembrance of the last enslaved Black Americans to be freed. Recognizing the pivotal moment in history at the federal or state level, however, did not come until more than a century later.
President Joe Biden signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act into law in 2021, recognizing June 19 as a federal holiday. Juneteenth commemorates the anniversary of June 19, 1865, when enslaved African Americans in Texas — the last state of the Confederacy with institutional slavery — were told they were free.
On March 24, Utah followed suit in declaring June 19, a state holiday. Currently, 24 states legally recognize Juneteenth as an official state holiday, Texas being the first 1980.
Ogden native George Green had never heard of Juneteenth until 1985. Green was 35 years old when his friend Truman Hill told him about the celebration and how it came to be.
“You’re free to go, you’re free to speak, you’re free to love,” Green said. “We need to celebrate that.”
Green and Hill started Ogden’s first Juneteenth celebration at the Marshall White Center in 1985. The center, named after a Black Ogden police detective shot and killed in the line of duty, has been a resource in the predominately Black Jefferson neighborhood since it opened in 1963.
Bridget Middleton was 18 years old when she attended her first Juneteenth celebration. She said she was excited to know Africans Americans had a day of remembrance that was just for them.
“It should be celebrated by everybody to realize what Blacks have done for this country,” Green said.
As the president of Growing Unified Development, a nonprofit, nonpartisan group of advocates bringing people together, Marcus Carr said June 19, 1865, marked the beginning of Reconstruction in the U.S. after the Civil War.
Carr, Green’s son, said the one thing he remembers most of his first Juneteenth celebration was how everybody came together. It was intimate, he said.
Carr and Middleton, who were at the State Capital on other business the day the senate voted on House Bill 338 observing Juneteenth as an official state holiday, said they did not know it was on the agenda, but they were meant to be there.
“That moment when the Senate all said aye — it was beautiful,” Carr said of the signified change in Utah.