Leonard Jeffries
EAST ORANGE, NJ — Joining the long list of those celebrating Juneteenth, East Orange honored the national holiday by holding a flag raising on June 19 at City Hall, with many elected officials in attendance. Commemorating the end of slavery in the United States, Juneteenth is now recognized as an official national holiday.
Councilwoman Alicia Holman, along with colleagues Councilman Vernon Pullins Jr. and Councilwoman Brittany Claybrooks, thanked the nation’s ancestors who have made Juneteenth possible.
“We stand here before you today in recognizing that we’re standing on the shoulders of our ancestors,” Holman said June 19. “We thank them for all that they’ve done for us. Without them, we would not be able to do what we do here as elected officials. We wouldn’t have been able to attend certain colleges and Ivy League schools. So, we thank them and give the knee, bow in honor of them.”
Holman also recognized Darryl Jeffries, president of the Oranges and Maplewood NAACP.
“To Mr. Jeffries, the historian, thank you for so much, because I know you’ve been fighting that fight for us. We appreciate you, and we do not fall short in recognizing those,” Holman said.
Jeffries, who is originally from East Orange, spoke about the historic significance of Juneteenth and the NAACP.
“This is a great day for this great city, for our state, our nation and a great day for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People,” Jeffries said June 19. “In many respects, this is our authentic Independence Day, and now, with the stroke of the pen, President Biden has made it an official national holiday. We stand here today, at this moment of great reflection and inflection, to celebrate this historic milestone and to celebrate this unheralded American story of liberation that is not taught in our textbooks but will soon be.
“On behalf of the gifted and talented members of the Oranges and Maplewood NAACP, all of us should be members because our communities are under siege like never before in our history, and we must all come together in solidarity,” he continued. “We are on a mission here today to foster transformative change in the 11 communities in Essex County that we serve. We’re on a mission to enlist or recruit 500 new members and 500 newly registered voters. We embrace the fierce urgency of now, as we are engaged in the important work of becoming a go-to resource hub for those communities that we serve here.
“We embrace this day with a renewed sense of purpose to tell this truly American story and to remind ourselves of how far we have come and how much further we have to go. For the knee of oppression, suppression and injustice has been on our collective necks for the past 400 years. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” he concluded.
The commemorative flag, designed by the Oranges and Maplewood NAACP, honored the historic moment and the extraordinary contributions of people of color, to the nation and to the world.
Keynote speaker Leonard Jeffries, a former professor of black studies at the City College of New York, is known for his Pan-African Afrocentric views that the role of African people in history and the accomplishments of African Americans are far more important than commonly held.
“I want to be able to make East Orange one of the special places of Essex County, a center of African knowledge,” Leonard Jeffries said June 19. “My wife and I have an enormous collection of books, which we were going to offer to Morgan State University, but Morgan doesn’t deserve all that we have. That collection has to find a place in Essex County. Essex County is a special, peculiar, phenomenon in the history of America. Newark, Oranges, Montclair — we need to tell that story of what black folks have done.
“We have to understand that we have made a statement, African peoples in New Jersey. This county has something very special, so we want to enhance it. We need to be proud of this blackness,” he concluded.
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