14 JUNE 13-19, 2024 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | LETTERS | CONTENTS | Reclaiming Culture TERRI GENTRY DISCUSSES THE HISTORY AND IMPORTANCE OF JUNETEENTH IN DENVER. BY TEAGUE BOHLEN Colorado historian and multi-generational Denverite Terri Gentry recalls a lot of won- derful things about the annual Juneteenth celebration in Five Points. The music. The food. The parades and the marching bands and the drill teams. “There’s so much to it,” she smiles. “It’s really about reclaim- ing culture. Making sure it’s not forgotten. Celebrations like this energize people to keep moving forward on our freedom, our human rights, our voting rights, and keeping people aware of what we need to confront now, even as we look back to June 19, 1865, and all that our ancestors had to do in order to keep those same things moving forward. There’s still a lot to do.” Gentry is the Engagement Manager for Black Communities at History Colorado and serves on the board of directors of the Black American West Mu- seum, where she is also a docent. She’s also a lec- turer, a writer, an educator and a facilitator — as well as someone with a famil- ial legacy that touches on much of the Black experi- ence in Denver’s twenti- eth century. Her paternal great-grandfather was Dr. Ernest McClain, the fi rst licensed Black dentist in Colorado, back in 1906. And she fondly recalls watching her friends eat pig-ear sandwiches from a little stand at 25th and Welton streets — a place they’d walk to from Man- ual High School during lunch. “They loved them,” she says with a laugh, “but I just couldn’t do it.” Not only is it important for people to come together to celebrate Juneteenth, Gentry says, but it’s vital to understand all the history that came before it, and how it played out in the century-plus that followed. “In looking at Juneteenth,” she says, “you have to look at everything that led up to it.” We can go as far back as 1501, she notes, when the slave trade to the Americas is said to have begun. And of course, there’s the direct antecedent, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which took effect in 1863. “It was a move to impact the Civil War,” Gentry explains, “a way to impact the economy of the South. But it only applied to the states that were trying to secede from the Union. So they still had slavery in states like Tennessee and Ken- tucky and Delaware and Missouri. It was more complex than many people realize. The Union Army was going into areas and effectively spreading the word that these people had their freedom.” But that effort took time. “Texas is a unique part of that history,” Gentry says. It was only in 1848 that the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ceded most of what’s now the American Southwest — including about two-thirds of Colorado — to the United States following the Mexican- American War. “One of the issues you never hear about in our history,” says Gentry, “is that Mexico gained its independence in 1821 and ended slavery by 1829. The problem was that Americans were moving west and bringing slavery back to what became Texas for many years.” Texas formally declared its independence from Mexico in 1836, during the war, and was eventually annexed into the U.S. in 1845. “They wanted to secede from Mexico fi rst so they could continue the practice of slavery,” Gentry explains. “The United States saw that as an opportunity, which was when they bought all that land for about $15 million” as part of the treaty, fully forming the state. What may have been seen as an oppor- tunity for the burgeoning United States was a disaster for Native peoples — both Indigenous Americans and Mexicans alike. “A lot of them lost their land,” Gentry says. “A lot of them lost their citizenship. Some of them became enslaved. They were heavily and horribly impacted, and you never hear about that.” Perhaps because the Emancipation Proclama- tion was a military ma- neuver, we don’t celebrate that as a date relating to freedom. Or the surrender at Appomattox, in April 1865. Instead, we celebrate June 19 of that year, be- cause that’s the day that General Gordon Granger led Union soldiers to Galveston, Texas, with General Order Number 3. “That’s what declared that all people in Texas had been declared free,” Gentry says. “But still, you could go through parts of west Texas and fi nd people still enslaved up through the 1920s.” While Juneteenth itself was designed to celebrate that day in June 1865, Gentry emphasizes that it’s more than just an an- niversary. “The challenge for me is that we’re still fi ghting,” she says. “We’re still fi ghting for our freedom. We probably had more freedom for a brief moment in time back then. The 13th Amendment outlawing slavery was a critical piece of legislation — that was signed by Lincoln in 1865, and right after that was when he was assassinated, and President Andrew Johnson was in place to get three- quarters of the states to ratify the 13th by the end of the year. “It was in 1866 that Schuyler Colfax — yes, the guy for whom Colfax Avenue was named — was Speaker of the House and helped push through the Civil Rights Act of 1866,” she continues. “President Johnson vetoed that, but Colfax was able to override the veto. I always like to remind folks about Schuyler Colfax and who he was. He was an abolition- ist. This man fought for our freedoms.” Denver’s contribution to national celebra- tions of Juneteenth began in the 1950s, with a Five Points businessman named Otha P. Rice. “He was from Texas,” Gentry says, “and he came up here and started Rice’s Tap House at 2801 Welton Street. It was a restaurant and club, so you had a lot of musicians and artists coming in. He was the one who be- gan celebrating Juneteenth on Welton in a formal sense. A lot of people were already marking the day amongst themselves — families getting together for a barbecue, that sort of thing — but he made it an event that took place at the Tap House.” Rice would eventually come to be called the “Father of Juneteenth” here in Denver. The event expanded to become one of the largest celebrations of its kind in the United States over the decades, as local businessmen gathered to support, publicize and grow its impact through their work with the Five Points Business Association. It’s estimated that the 1983 Juneteenth celebration drew in some 60,000 people. After a spike in gang violence in the ’80s, the Juneteenth event began to shrink — along with the clout of the Five Points Business Association as many CULTURE continued on page 16 KEEP UP ON DENVER ARTS AND CULTURE AT WESTWORD.COM/ARTS Today tens of thousands of people pack Five Points for the Juneteenth Music festival. Five Points businessman Otha Rice started Denver’s neighborhood Juneteenth celebration in the 1950s. YOUTUBE JUNETEENTH MUSIC FESTIVAL
