Eastville and LTV Celebrate Juneteenth

The Eastville Community Historical Society and LTV’s World Voices series observed the first Juneteenth Jubilee Awards Celebration last week at LTV Studios in Wainscott.

Along with a commemoration of June 19, 1865, the date on which enslaved people in Texas were declared free under the 1862 Emancipation Proclamation, the event served to recognize Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr., who is retiring from the State Assembly this year, and several East End cultural organizations. It also was a fundraiser to replace the historic cedar roof of Heritage House in Sag Harbor, the Historical Society’s headquarters.

The evening included live music by artists including Antoine Hilton and Company, food and drink, and jewelry, art and clothing vendors.

“I was so overjoyed to be in the room and filled with energy” Dr. Georgette Grier-Key, the Historical Society’s executive director, said after the event. The celebration, she said, “is to honor colleagues, organizations who really put in the work and the time for the greater community and consider someone other than themselves. What better way to celebrate this as the first than with these community collaborators, co-designers, co-conspirators? As a small institution, we have to rely on and want to work with other people.”

Along with Thiele, Bay Street Theater, Canio’s Book Cafe, the Village Preservation Society of East Hampton, the East Hampton Town Parks Department, Guild Hall, the John Jermaine Memorial Library, the Montauk Historical Society, the Parrish Art Museum, the Pyrrhus Concer Action Committee, Sag Harbor Cinema, Sylvester Manor Farm and VFW Post 9082 were honored.

Juneteenth was recognized as a federal holiday in 2021, an acknowledgment several speakers called long overdue. In her remarks, Maria Delongoria, the Historical Society’s vice president, noted that Mississippi only ratified the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which abolished slavery, in 1995, and did not submit the required documentation to ratify the Amendment until 2013.

The holiday was “not something that my family had grown up even knowing anything about or celebrating” said Michael Butler, co-chairman of the event and the Historical Society’s cemetery preservation director. “I only became aware of Juneteenth maybe 25 years ago, when my brother and I curated an event on African American holidays and traditions.”

Thiele seconded that experience. When he was first elected to the Suffolk County Legislature, he was invited by the NAACP to a Juneteenth celebration, he recalled.

“I didn’t know anything about Juneteenth, and I was a history major in college,” he said. “I think that tells you about … how far we’ve come.”

He observed that baseball legend Willie Mays had died the day before Juneteenth. “I think of growing up in Sag Harbor, playing stickball on the St. Andrew’s parking lot, at Mashashimuet Park” in the early 1960s, around 15 years after Jackie Robinson became the first Black player in Major League Baseball’s modern era.

“You didn’t think about it at the time, but there were all of us, we wanted to be Willie Mays. We wanted to be Hank Aaron, we wanted to be Roberto Clemente,” he said. “We also wanted to be Mickey Mantle. But think about that: In a few short years, little white kids in Sag Harbor, a blue-collar community, Willie Mays was their hero. … It’s all part of our history.”

“A big part of what we want to do,” Grier-Key said, “is teach and learn from one another — history, what it means, but also keep the fact that this is an evaluation of slavery and its legacy that is with us today. … In terms of celebrating freedom, it’s important for everyone to celebrate, but the most important thing to me is, this is an acknowledgment of what they say is the stain of America, slavery. Finally, there is an acknowledgment through the holiday of Juneteenth.”

“The amount of love and participation that I saw really was a testament to the work and the respect that is out there for Eastville,” Delongoria said after the event.