HUTTO — Hutto’s fifth annual Juneteenth March and Festival strode into Adam Orgain Park June 14 with voices raised singing “We Shall Overcome,” a civil rights anthem dating to the 1940s.
The celebration included a fashion show, live music, vendors and activities. Black Families of Hutto sponsored this year’s event along with the city’s Parks and Recreation Department.
Jennings (clockwise from left), Robert Williams, Alvin Hill and Matt Bowen play dominoes at the Hutto Juneteenth celebration. Dominoes has long been a social part of Black culture.
“This is the second year that we’ve done this with Black Families of Hutto. We enjoy this great partnership, and to be able to bring this event and all the things it represents to the citizens of Hutto,” said Jeff White, director of the city’s parks and recreation department.
White said the city provided logistical support and resources for the festival, as well as some financial support.
This year the festival centered on the theme “Fashion and Resistance since 1865.” Onnesha Williams, founder and director of Black Families of Hutto, represented the flower child era of the 1960s and 1970s wearing peace signs, hearts and a flower headband.
“Fashion and Resistance is us telling our story of how, since 1865 when emancipation happened, we always as a culture of people have created our own ways to resist,” Williams said.
Williams said from the Regency Victorian clothing of the country’s Gilded Age through zoot suits and hip-hop, Black fashion was a way of pushing back against social oppression.
“We’ve seen a shift since (the 2020 murder of) George Floyd, when we had the first March to now,” she said. “We are seeing that there are legal efforts to actually take away some of the Voting Rights Act and take away the Civil Rights Act and erasing some of our culture. So, it’s very significant for us to keep reminding ourselves where we came from and the power that we have to resist.”
Choyce Elam, entertainment coordinator for the event, said working on it is a labor of love, not only because families celebrate but also because of its significance to all generations. “It is important for every adult to know their history, and the reason why Juneteenth is so important for Texas,” Elam said. “And it is so important that the youth today know. You don’t let them get off, you explain to them what slavery is. You show it to them.”
The festival also gave local vendors a chance to interact with the community. Joseph De Las Nieves with Renewal by Andersen said about half of his company’s window and door business involves people who live in older, established communities including historically Black areas.
“We love to empower people, because having good windows and doors … increases the quality of your life,” he said.
Deandre Wheeler Sr. brought his nonprofit horse therapy company, Rein & Restore Foundation, to the Hutto Juneteenth festival to offer horse rides and discuss mental health and healing with the community. Manor-based Rein & Restore provides healing through nature in partnership with the African American Youth Harvest Foundation and the Harvest Summer Recovery Center.
Wheeler said the Black community is underserved in mental health care, partly because of a natural reticence to seek help.
“When we think about healing in the African American culture, we don’t want to heal. We do other things besides healing, so what this service does right here is to show people that it’s okay to hurt, it’s okay to heal,” he said.
Wheeler also uses his horses to tell the combined history of Black cowboys and horses.
“A lot of people forget about our Buffalo Soldiers. So, I think it’s very cool for me to be here to show the younger kids that this was our culture,” Wheeler said. “At one point in time this was the way of living. It’s keeping the history alive.”
Juneteenth, a play on the date June 19, celebrates the day the Union Army arrived in Galveston in 1865 to announce and enforce that all enslaved people in Confederate states were free.
Devante McGowan and daughter McKenzie wade in Brushy Creek to cool off during Juneteenth.
People splash in Brushy Creek at Adam Orgain Park during the Juneteenth celebration.
Deandre Wheeler Sr. rides G-Baby. Wheeler runs the nonprofit Rein & Restore Foundation, which offered horseback rides at the Juneteenth festival. Photos by Edie Zuvanich
