![]() SANDRECZKI: I feel like that fits in so well with what you're saying. SANDRECZKI: It makes me think of the whole lineup of comedians performing Saturday night. Then taking this into a space where we can celebrate, educate, we can come together and organize, to continue to move this legacy of freedom and coming to age in America. That's my biggest memory of Juneteenth is taking this thing that was horrific: not telling people that they're free. When I think about Black bodies and Blackness and what our legacy really is moving forward, is always being able to take something that may have been terrible, an atrocity, and finding a way to find the good. So all these people, having this extended family and coming together and celebrating something that at one point was just so negative, but really turning it into a positive. Much as we're representing with this Supperclub, I remember always going to our park, our Black neighborhood in Iowa, and just seeing all my family and friends and people that I call my cousins, right? In the Black community, everybody's your cousin. We were one of the first states to actually recognize it before it was a federal holiday. SANDRECZKI: Did you celebrate Juneteenth growing up?ĬARSON: I actually did. That's what's wonderful as a Black American woman about Black American culture, we're able to do it all. We can make things that were wrong, right. ![]() This is just another example of when we right those wrongs, how we can do those things. Lastly, you always want to constantly reflect on the history of where we've been to know where we want to go. There's times where we want to sit back and reflect and memorialize in a learning type environment that we need to know what history is, so we don't repeat it.īut also, it's a celebration! It's a celebration of liberation it's a celebration of light it's a celebration of highlighting the Black body and the Black experience in a way that it's not about something negative, but very positive, and that the community is coming together around that. SANDRECZKI: When you think of the day, do you think of it as a remembrance? Or a celebration? Or maybe sort of forward-looking or you used the word "commemoration?" How do you think of that?ĬARSON: I think it's kind of like a "but and, but and, but and," so everything that you said. We are Burlingtonians and we're here to celebrate Juneteenth and just create this community of this radical belonging. This year's theme is "Embrace & Belonging," and what better way to do it than over a family meal? We are all family. MONICA SANDRECZKI: It almost seems heavenly.ĬARSON: Yes! Absolutely. I think it's going to be absolutely beautiful. Weather permitting, it will be a long, family-style table right in the middle of Main Street, overlooking the lake. KIM CARSON: When we talk about family and friends, it's always about baking bread and having that really good barbecue that meal in a Black community, and what we wanted to do was do that here in Burlington. She told NCPR, at the center of it, is a supper club, a community meal in the heart of town. She says Burlington has a whole lineup of events to commemorate tomorrow: local Black hip hop artists, Afrobeat musicians, rappers, comedians, hair stylists, cooks, and spoken word artists. "As we rise, as the tide rises for Black people, it rises for everyone." We've always been inclusive in our struggle," said Kim Carson, director of the Office for Race, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging, in Burlington Vermont. "We need to celebrate this like we do everything in America: we go big and we go hard and do that in a way we elevate and center Black voices but also as Black people have always done. Celebrating Juneteenth across the North Country ![]()
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