‘We pull together’: Juneteenth Jubilee highlights importance of community action

As part of a weekend-long celebration of Juneteenth, Islanders and visitors flocked to Oak Bluffs on Saturday for the Islands’ second annual Juneteenth Jubilee.

Considered the nation’s second Independence Day, Juneteenth commemorates the emancipation of enslaved African Americans. It took two years after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation for enslaved people in Galveston, Texas to be told that they’d been freed. That was June 19, 1865. 

Since, Juneteenth celebrations are held largely in recognition of the Black community in Texas, who were the last to know of their emancipation. 

Saturday’s festivities began in the afternoon at the Union Chapel — a last minute change in location from the Tabernacle, due to inclement weather — and quickly garnered more attendees than seats to sit them.

After prayer led by Dr. Michael Eric Dyson, organizer Kahina Van Dyke kicked off the event by formally introducing Oak Bluffs Police Chief Jon Searle — who’d been in the position for just one year — to the audience. 

The crowd also heard from NAACP Martha’s Vineyard branch President Toni Kauffman, and mother-daughter duo Joanne Edey-Rhodes and Nia Rhodes, who spoke on the history of The Cottagers, Inc. — a historic nonprofit organization for African American women homeowners on Martha’s Vineyard. 

“The historical legacy of Juneteenth shows the value of never giving up hope in uncertain times,” Kaufman cited from the National Museum of African American History and Culture. “We’re living in uncertain times.” 

Despite this, Kaufman noted, Martha’s Vineyard offers something that other American towns may not — a unique sense of community that can sometimes distance Island residents from mainland societal and cultural woes.

“When you’re in what we call America, things are widespread and you see things in a broader sense,” she said. “But as we are here on the Vineyard, there’s a heightened sense of what is happening in the community. We know each other.” 

“We may have differences — we may have very distinct differences,” Kaufman added. “However when it’s important, when there needs to be unity, it does happen here. . . We pull together for one another.” 

The Cottagers Inc. historian Joanne Edey-Rhodes and her daughter Nia Rhodes echoed that sentiment. The organization serves as a community within a community, they said, and allows for intergenerational understanding and appreciation of the history of the Black community, especially women, on the Vineyard. 

First termed Cottagers’ Corner, based on Dorothy West’s Vineyard newspaper column of the same name, the organization began raising money and holding community events in the 1950’s. 

Needing more space for member meetings, The Cottagers eventually took over a former town hall building and turned it into the group’s headquarters. By the mid 1970’s, the building was paid in full. “They were able to burn the mortgage,” Edey-Rhodes said. 

“For black women to own property like that, even today, it’s an amazing feat,” she said, especially considering many of those women grew up around the time of the Great Depression. 

Since then, The Cottagers has made its mark on the Vineyard, sponsoring a number of Island initiatives and donating funds to local healthcare organizations, like the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital and the Oak Bluffs former senior center. 

Edey-Rhodes’ daughter, Nia Rhodes shared her experience growing up part-time on the Island, and actively involved with The Cottagers programs. 

“It speaks to the intergenerational and multigenerational [facets] of growing up here,” she said. 

Originally hailing from New York City, Rhodes spent her childhood summers with her grandmother — a former Cottagers member — volunteering with the organization in Oak Bluffs. 

“We were taught that you pitch in, you participate, you work,” she said. That work often consisted of providing tours of Cottagers’ buildings. 

Through the organization’s philanthropic work, Rhodes said, younger generations of Black women learned the importance of giving back to the community. 

Rounding out the speaker portion of Saturday’s event was Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, who spoke on the importance of acknowledging the African-American experience in America’s history. 

Hannah-Jones, largely known for developing The 1619 Project, which focuses on the slavery amid the founding of the United States, used her time to touch on the politicization of “woke” culture and some of the events that led up to reemergence of white nationalism in America.

With a predominant focus on segregation in the school system, Hannah-Jones said her work has been aimed at shining a light on much of America’s history that has been excluded from school curriculums across the country, along with an overall hesitance to offer classes on critical race theory to students.  

In addressing those issues, Hannah-Jones emphasized the importance of being actively involved in the local community. “All politics is local,” she said. 

“We obsess over who’s going to be in the White House, who’s going to be in the Senate, but they don’t actually pass laws and policies that impact most of us every day,” she added. “It’s your local school board, your city council, your local government, your statehouse.”