Juneteenth in Ukiah: A Fusion of Tradition, Art, and Community Spirit

The Junetenth celebration at the MEC in Ukiah exceeded expectations, with newcomers and old-timers alike enjoying music, poetry, and massive amounts of home-cooked food.

Troyle Tognoli was the brains, brawn, and organizational might behind the event. It took some doing to get her to sit down for a few minutes and survey the crowd that filled the tiny space and spilled out onto the sidewalk.

“This is the most amazing turnout ever,” she enthused, adding that it lined up perfectly with this year’s theme, which was “Their Wildest Dreams.”

Juneteenth has long been celebrated as freedom day in African American communities. It’s the anniversary of the day in 1865 when enslaved people in Galveston, Texas finally learned about the Emancipation Proclamation, which was two years old by that time.

Bill MC Squared, a DJ at KMEC, is still blown away by the history. “The slaveholding class was desperate to continue slavery,” he marveled. “They were willing to fight a war to continue slavery. That’s how profitable it was. It’s the worst thing this country has ever done.”

Tognoli wishes African American history lessons would take some of the emphasis off slavery. She points to the work of African American divers who are mapping sunken slave ships to learn about the cultures the people on them came from, and to make connections with those communities today. “There is an entire African-American diving team that is making it their business to bring this information to the surface,” she said, citing Tara Robertson’s work in the National Geographic. “These are stories you would never, ever, ever hear. That is why it’s so important that we can move beyond the premise of slavery and move into other areas. Let’s talk about all the things that have happened, and the impact of those actions on our people.” 

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But the gruesomeness of chattel slavery is impossible to forget. Thirteen-year-old Soria Wrightcart read an original poem called, “Have You Ever Heard the Cry of a Slave” for the public for the first time at the Juneteenth celebration. For her, the event was a mix of chores and support for her creativity. “The theme of the poem was what Black people went through during the slave trade,” she said, explaining that she focused her piece on the experience of one man, “so that one person could sum up the whole story in the poem…This is the first time I’ve actually participated in anything that was Black-related in Ukiah, because there’s not a lot of Black people in Ukiah.” Her participation involved a certain amount of washing dishes and preparing food, but also “reciting my poem a few times, so that I’d have a warming feeling” before she presented it to the full audience.

In addition to spoken word, there was a wealth of musical tradition. Greg Bryant is a jazz pianist who says he just showed up to play a little background music. But every song had significance, starting with “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the Negro national anthem, which he said was “very powerful in my upbringing in a Black Baptist church…One of the most incredible jazz musicians in Los Angeles, Horace Tapscott, with the Pan-Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, closed every event with that song.”

The music was unobtrusive enough that people could visit with friends and ignore it, or take part in the tradition. He recounted that “One of the locals said, hey, that song sounds like ‘Summertime,’ and so she improvised” over his playing, which is exactly what jazz musicians show up to do. “So it’s been an event of improvisation,” he reflected, in addition to organization. He added that he was working to demonstrate the many styles of Black music, “from Gospel, where we started, to blues, to contemporary, to standard classics, to Broadway songs, to avant-garde music that allowed me to just fly.”

Zappa Montag is also engaged in a family tradition. He moved to the coast in the early 70’s when he was three years old. He grew up with back to the landers, a movement that’s now evolving into a new stage. He is part of a group called Black to the Land, which is getting ready to steward property on Emerald Earth Sanctuary, outside of Boonville. He described the new initiative as “an example of a positive reparations campaign, where the people who stewarded the land, who were almost all white people, got to a point where they wanted people who could take over and take up the stewardship, but also wanted to find access for people who hadn’t had that kind of access. Of course, we are taking that up with the knowledge that this is Pomo land.”

Bill MC Squared says since the murder of George Floyd, he’s seen some cultural improvements for Black and brown people. But he’s frustrated with the whole concept, saying the differences between individuals of different races are insignificant. “If a scientist were studying animals, and he came upon horses, and he said the black horses were one race, and the white ones were another race, he would be laughed at,” he declared. “And that is what I believe, what I know is a fact: that the differences in mankind are just nothing. Nothing.”

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