Celebrating freedom: Morgan City marks new Juneteenth holiday

Local community members celebrated the newly minted state and federal Juneteenth holiday with activities Saturday in Morgan City.
The event featured a bike ride with stops at various black-owned businesses, where cyclists heard histories of the businesses and their impact on the African American community. The day concluded with a gathering at Jimmie Johnson Memorial Park under the elevated U.S. 90 bridge where those gathered heard from guest speaker Patsy Powell.
Juneteenth marks the anniversary of June 19, 1865, when Union Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger led Union soldiers to Galveston, Texas, and told the enslaved that the war was over and they actually had been freed 2½ years earlier through the Emancipation Proclamation.
Juneteenth was christened a national holiday Thursday by President Joe Biden. Earlier this month, Gov. John Bel Edwards signed a bill recognizing it as a state holiday.
While the Civil War meant freedom for more than 250,000 slaves, Juneteenth Community Bike Ride committee member Danika Foley Long said that many were still enslaved up to 100 years later in areas such as Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas and Florida, not knowing they were free.
“So when people ask you why you’re still talking about slavery, it wasn’t that long ago,” she said. “You could forget 1865. Think about the 1960s where people were still plowing the fields and didn’t know they were free.”
She said the state of Mississippi had never submitted paperwork to ratify the 13th amendment until Feb. 7, 2013.
Powell, a Morgan City native and resident, asked those present , “What are you going to do with your newfound freedom?”
In her speech, she highlighted several pieces of African American history in Morgan City.
“Telling the history of generations of generations can’t be told in one day,” she said. “It’d take a lifetime to tell what we have done.”
She said that in 1965, her mother formed a group called the Voter’s League out of her Bowman Street home to get people registered to vote. They were helped by a New York-based group called Congress on Racial Equality, or CORE, who came to the area on their way to Mississippi. CORE slept on the living room floor of the home of Powell’s mother.
Just out of high school, Powell said she walked down Railroad Avenue trying to get people to register to vote.
“Many doors were closed in our faces,” she said. “I was hurt because I never had a door closed in my face. I said I wasn’t going back. My mother listened and she said, ‘well, see you tomorrow morning on Railroad Avenue and Mount Street,’ and that was the end of that conversation because that’s where we were.”
She also noted her mother played a part in getting food stamps in St. Mary Parish, while her two sisters and brother were escorted into M.E. Norman School by a black lawyer from New York in 1965.
“Mayor (Dr. C.R.) Brownell said there would be no problems in Morgan City,” Powell said. “There was no problem, but the struggle was real.”
Powell encourages those present to tell their children about African American history.
“Tell them your history,” she said. “They’re not going to find it in the history books. They’re going to only learn it around the dinner table, the backyard barbecues. We have fought a long time. We still have some more fighting to do, but we’re going to get it done, and we’re going to do it together. We want to be together to do this.”
Courtney “Schola” Long, a community bike ride committee member, said that African American history is something he discusses with his children often.
“Hopefully, you do the same because we have to keep that history going, and we have to let our people know that we do exist historically in this city, in this nation, in this world,” he said.
The history is something that Councilmen Steve Domangue and Tim Hymel said they learned from the event.
Hymel, who is principal of Morgan City High School, said the same opportunities in education are present for all youth.
Danika Long said she hopes to build on this year’s event with a larger one next year.
Mayor Lee Dragna took it a step further.
“Next year, this thing is going to be full,” he said of Jimmie Johnson Memorial Park’s court. “You better get a ticket because it’s going to be full. … This is fantastic.”