COVINGTON, Ga. — James Hamm said he believed it was important to be featured as the "king” of this year’s Juneteenth parade because of the need to highlight the events surrounding the nation’s newest national holiday.
“It’s one chance in a lifetime,” he said.
Hamm’s family has operated Town House Cafe on the Covington Square for 58 years. He inherited its operation from founder Ossie Lee R. Stone Hamm, his mother, and operated it until he gave over operation to his son, Cedrick, in recent years.
James Hamm said he was like many others and knew little about the history of Juneteenth until he “saw it on TV” and learned about its origins.
Now, he wants to help bring about awareness of Juneteenth as others do while being part of local history.
“That’s history and you can’t beat history,” he said. “They’ll look back after I’m gone and see Hamm up there and say, ‘That’s history.’”
The annual parade is set to step off from Legion Field at 3173 Mill St. with more than 60 entries beginning at 10 a.m., said parade organizer Ann Bargie.
It is set to wind its way along Newton Street, Anderson Avenue and Floyd Street to the Covington Square before returning along the same route to Legion Field. Dance performances are set for part of the Square before the parade winds its way to the area, Bargie said.
The post-parade celebration is set for Legion Field with live and DJ music, vendors, a “Bad Hatters” hat fashion show, and more. Visit www.georgiajuneteenth.com for more information.
On Sunday, an All White Father’s Day Bash is scheduled for Under the Stars Banquet Center at 872 Moore St. in Oxford. For tickets to the Bash, call 740-755-1807 or 404-861-0707. Visit www.georgiajuneteenth.com for more information.
The local celebration of the event dates to 2011 when the Newton County branch of the NAACP hosted the inaugural Juneteenth celebration at Bethlehem Baptist Church on Usher Street.
Terri James and Gwen Green then organized the annual celebration in its current form in 2012 with a daytime festival at Nelson Heights Community Center on Lassiter Street and a Black History Gala at an event facility in Oxford.
James, a retired telecommunications worker, also organized this year’s events and said she chose to continue working on it after the initial local interest fell off somewhat because she wanted to spread the word about the need to celebrate the de facto end of African-American slavery in the U.S.
Black Texas residents had celebrated the Juneteenth holiday as the end of slavery in the state for more than 150 years before it became more widely accepted.
President Abraham Lincoln made the Emancipation Proclamation ending the practice of slavery in the U.S. effective in the midst of the Civil War in 1863. However, it could not be implemented in Confederate-controlled territory, including Texas, for almost two more years.
On June 19, 1865, Union troops arrived in Galveston Bay, Texas, and announced that hundreds of thousands of enslaved Black people in the state were free by executive decree — leading to its celebration as “Juneteenth.”
It slowly gained acceptance over the decades locally and nationwide as Texas residents migrated to other parts of the country.
Texas in 1979 became the first of many states to make Juneteenth an official holiday. In June 2021, Congress passed a resolution establishing Juneteenth as a national holiday and President Joe Biden signed it into law on June 17, 2021.
Bargie said it was important for people to continue to be educated about the holiday’s origins because many still are unaware of it.
“It was important that we as a diverse county — I’m not saying just Black but diverse, the whole county — get involved in knowing about different events that’s going on.
“We know about the Fourth of July and we all participate in that,” she said. “It is very important that people come out and share in this event because it’s new, it’s new to us all.”
