Lake Junaluska hosts its first-ever Juneteenth celebration

The “freedom celebration” was held June 19 at the Nanci Weldon Gym at the Lake Junaluska Conference and Retreat Center. It began with a worship service that featured singing and revelry, along with stories recalling the history of enslaved Black people and a speech promoting a message of unity.

Following the service was a celebration featuring games, booths promoting local organizations, food trucks and music from Haywood County’s own Scoundrel’s Lounge.

The celebration proved an instant hit and provided people who’ve been cooped up amid the pandemic lockdowns of the last year a chance to gather and rejoice in a story of American freedom.

Juneteenth story

Historical interpreter Novella Nimmo offered two stories, the first of which recalled the story of Juneteenth, beginning with the transport of enslaved Africans to places such as the Caribbean, Brazil and the U.S.

“It’s estimated that over 12.5 million people were taken out of Africa and brought to the new world,” Nimmo said.

In total, about 300,000 to 400,000 slaves were brought to the U.S. Most ended up working in tobacco, rice, sugar or cotton fields.

“They worked these people from the time the sun came up until the time the sun went down,” she said.

The desperate centuries that followed cemented the system that kept people enslaved. However, on Jan. 1, 1863, in the middle of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

“He said all slaves are free that are of the Union, but those that are still under Confederate control … they’re not free,” Nimmo said, adding that five Union states also still allowed people to own slaves.

Even once the Civil War ended in April of 1865, some areas continued to allow slavery. The last holdout was Galveston, Texas.

“These people didn’t know anything about the Emancipation Proclamation,” Nimmo said. “They didn’t even know that the war had ended. Some people say the reason they didn’t tell them the war was over is that there was so much cotton to pick.”

But the time would eventually come. On June 18, 1865, Gen. Gordon Granger rode into Galveston with 2,000 soldiers. He first informed the Confederate soldiers that the slaves on the island were free.

“On June 19, he rang the bell, and he called all the enslaved people to the field,” Nimmo said.

That’s when he read to them “Order No. 3.” The order stated plainly that all slaves were free.

“This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor,” Granger told the group. “The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.”

“I imagine all they heard was ‘we are free,’” Nimmo said. “They didn’t hear anything else. I can imagine them standing there hearing those words. I can imagine some people just crying and I can imagine people falling on their knees. I can imagine them shouting and thanking God.”

Although the newly freed people were “advised” to stick around, many ventured out into the unknown. Nimmo said she imagined landowners pleading for them to stay, saying they wouldn’t have any way to make a living if they left.

“I imagine them saying, ‘I’m going to find that daughter I lost or that husband that was taken away,’” she said.

Keynote address

Following Nimmo’s story, Rev. Dr. Stephanie Moore Hand offered her keynote address. Hand spent some of that elaborating on Nimmo’s story.

“Some historians say the leaders of that city and state, they knew the slaves had been set free,” she said of Galveston. “But they had farmland they wanted to harvest. They had some money they needed to make.”

“In their heart of hearts, they said what are we going to do when we have to pay these folks,” she added. “We won’t get 100% of the income because we’ll have to share with the labor force.”

Hand said that while the story is about Black history, it is also so much more.

Hand wove elements of Black culture into her message, even down to the food, from pork chops and brown gravy over rice to buttermilk-marinated fried chicken.

“It’s important to know our history,” she said. “It’s important to know our culture. It’s important to know our American story, because when we don’t know the American story, we cannot look each other in the eyes and say, ‘you’re my brother, and I’m your sister.’”

Hand recalled several of many racially motivated atrocities that took place on American soil and ended in significant loss of Black lives, from the 1866 New Orleans massacre to the 1898 Wilmington Insurrection and the burning of Tulsa’s Black Wall Street in 1921.

She said that in light of those and more recent tragedies, along with what she called the suppression of disadvantaged minorities’ votes, many of her Black friends are hesitant to celebrate Juneteenth.

“One celebration at a time,” she said. “We’ll deal with that, but we cannot not celebrate this because it stands on the shoulders of our ancestors who were beaten and killed … we’re going to celebrate that.”

Hand also said that amid all the coming together for the celebration of freedom, it’s OK to have differences, noting that although she understood why Colin Kaepernick knelt for the flag, she could never bring herself to kneel because her father was killed in combat in Vietnam.

“What I do care about is the policies we agree to or don’t agree to and how they affect all of humanity and not just some folks,” she added. “We’ve got to stop that because if we don’t stop that they’re not going to have another generation that can live free. What I like about America is freedom.”

How the celebration came together

Lake Junaluska Executive Director Ken Howle said the seed for the event was planted last year when he and others wanted to bring people together amid the growing Black Lives Matter movement.

“We were wondering what the right thing for Lake Junaluska was at that time,” he said. “We felt like a worship event would fit in so well with the history of this place. It’s such a great way to bring people together, not just Methodists but people from all faith backgrounds.”

Howle reached out to the Smoky Mountain District of the United Methodist Church to see if they’d support such an event.

“They grabbed ahold of this idea,” he said.

Linda Kelly, superintendent for Smoky Mountain District, said the discussion regarding the service began last fall but was hampered by the ongoing COVID crisis.

“We realized we couldn’t really do that in a safe way,” she said.

Eventually, the opportunity to have a large event again became viable, and the idea of hosting a Juneteenth service was floated. While the excitement was there, Kelly said there came a time that they realized there wasn’t enough Black representation among those planning.

“We had to hit the pause button and say, ‘we have to get the right people together; it needs to be people in the community coming together to make it happen,’” she said.

Kelly said she was thrilled that Lake Junaluska could host such a powerful celebration, adding that she hoped it was the first of many opportunities for people to come together, worship and have important conversations.

When asked what it meant that so many people came together in a world that often encourages division, tears streamed down her smiling face.

“It gives you a glimpse of how it’s meant to be,” she said. “This is the way the beloved country is supposed to look. This is it.”

Howle said the event exceeded his expectations. “When you see things that come together in a way that only God could do, it’s really amazing and reassures you that He has a plan,” he said.

Howle said that the process of planning the event even fostered a greater degree of understanding and called the outcome “serendipitous.”

“The process of planning it helped us understand that by being together with all types of people from different backgrounds, it creates greater understanding,” he said. “It made us all more empathetic with each other and our history and more driven toward a future that helps all people have the perspective we have today.”

Understanding, hope

Folks interviewed by The Mountaineer were all asked when they first learned about Juneteenth. While many had just found out about it within the last year or two, Hand remembers her grandparents talking about it when she was young.

“Then when I went to college, my minor was in African American studies, and it was taught there,” she said. “Now did I pay attention to it? No. But it was still in my mind.”

Doug Wingeier, 90, learned about Juneteenth this year. He said he was taken aback when he heard it was over two years between the Emancipation Proclamation and the slaves in Galveston learning they were free.

“I think it’s a great disappointment that it took that long for them to find out they were free, but I’m so happy that it’s now a national federal holiday,” he said.

Wingeier was a member of the NAACP when he lived in Tulsa about 40 years ago. However, he couldn’t recall learning about the massacre that occurred there.

“No one ever talked about it,” he said.

Howle said he first learned about Juneteenth two years ago when the Lake Junaluska singers did an online event commemorating the holiday.

“Learning from them and being a part of that helped me have a much deeper understanding,” he said, adding that his understanding grew even more at last weekend’s celebration. “It’s not only important that you know about something but it’s important that you understand something.”

Nimmo told The Mountaineer that remembering history is crucial, especially since the very nature of the Civil War is so often misconstrued.

“The soldiers are the ones that went out and fought while the wealthy stayed back and watched their neighbors die,” she said. “They were fighting a war they had nothing to do with. They weren’t getting rich off of it. They thought they were fighting to take their country back, but it wasn’t their country to begin with.”

Nimmo added that another often misrepresented element of American history involves the fact that it was enslaved Black people who built the country from the ground up.

“They got rich off of our backs,” she said.

“Teach the history,” she added. “All of it.”

Hand, who herself was ordained at Lake Junaluska, ultimately said that while there is still much work to be done, the response to her message left her feeling optimistic.

“I want my children’s America to be better than what it is right now … so to see the diverse people that were here, we can say there is hope and we can bring people together,” she said.