Area marks Juneteenth by celebrating freedom

By Rachana Dixit

Published: June 22, 2008

A slight rumble echoes around the V. Earl Dickinson building at Piedmont Virginia Community College. The constant beat reverberates through the Saturday afternoon heat, but it’s not that of construction or of cars rolling on the pavement.

Instead, the rhythm is coming from gimbe drums — a cylindrical, African drum carved from hard wood that measures about 3 feet tall. When percussionist Darrell Rose leads eight drummers during a workshop at this year’s Juneteenth celebration, it’s as if the audience is led, through their ears, to Africa.

“Time goes by when you’re drumming,” Rose said.

The eighth-annual Juneteenth celebration, a community event designed to examine history and celebrate cultures and freedom, was held Friday and Saturday on the community college’s grounds. Indoor and outdoor events included musical performances, a softball tournament, a children’s marketplace, history hunt, historical displays and re-enactments, voter registration and a community art project.

Rose, who has Algerian and Creole roots and has been drumming for about 40 years, said the beats and rhythms are more than just music.

“This is like a foreign language to us, but it is a language,” he said. He added that during slavery in America, drumming was forbidden everywhere except for one square in New Orleans.

Though Charlottesville’s event is only in its eighth year, the celebration of Juneteenth dates back to 1865. Retired PVCC professor Tamyra Turner said the celebration began in Texas, commemorating the day slaves in the town of Galveston learned they were free — June 19, 1865, more than two years after President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation took effect.

Additionally, the messenger who delivered the news in Texas more than 140 years ago — Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger — was an Albemarle County native.

“The history is ours in a very specific way,” Turner said.

For some, Juneteenth was about getting blacks to discover their roots. Caruso Brown, co-founder of the African-American Genealo-gy Group of Charlottesville, said like many blacks he couldn’t pinpoint his family’s origins because of the slave trade.

“It’s very difficult for people of African descent to trace their history more than two or three generations,” said Brown, whose family came from Africa to Buckingham County. Brown said he considers himself lucky because his family stayed in one place — he was able to trace his family in Virginia to 1794. But through DNA testing, in March 2007 he was able to pinpoint his ancestry to two Nigerian tribes.

Brown said he never would have figured that out on his own. “I sensed from history that [my ancestry] might be on the coast, but not anywhere in particular,” he said.

Since the 19th century, Juneteenth has drifted beyond the Midwest and is now celebrated in many parts of the country — last year, Turner said, about 300 people attended Charlottesville’s celebration, and some groups are looking to make it a national event. And just as the country has progressed, Turner said, the annual event has as well.

“[Juneteenth] has evolved just as we have in the ways we communicate and express ourselves,” Turner said. She then motioned toward where Rose and his drummers were playing in the shade.

“Just to be able to drum is an expression of freedom,” she said.