Juneteenth Celebrated at Dominican University

The Dominican University community came together to celebrate Juneteenth and its message of freedom.

On June 15, nearly 200 people turned out on the Quad for the third annual event, which featured a barbecue, Soul & Smoke food truck, music from DJ Greenb, games, and the Juneteenth Traveling Museum, a pop-up, educational booth from the West Communities Juneteenth Collaborative.

“The atmosphere of the entire day was reflective and uplifting,” said Amy Omi, project coordinator for Justice, Equity and Inclusion at Dominican and a lead organizer of the Juneteenth celebration with Jamal Patterson, assistant director of the Center for Cultural Liberation . “Folks came out to feel connected to community, to learn a history that has been erased from many of our educations, and to express what liberation truly feels like.”

“If we want to be a welcoming community and show that we are open-minded and inclusive, we need to show it, not just say it,” River Forest Trustee Katie Brennan said of the importance behind local Juneteenth commemorations like Dominican’s.

The village of River Forest hosted its second Juneteenth community flag raising this year, and Brennan is a member of the West Communities Juneteenth Collaborative.

Forest Park Mayor Rory Hoskins also attended the celebration on the Quad. Raised in Galveston, Texas, the birthplace of Juneteenth where the last enslaved people were freed by Union troops on June 18, 1865, Hoskins started an annual Juneteenth pool party in Forest Park in 2009.

“People don’t have to celebrate Juneteenth, but representation matters,” Hoskins said. “And when you have a campus like Dominican, that has a lot of students of color, I think they appreciate seeing the institution adopt a newer tradition, maybe one that is a little closer to their experience than other traditions.”

Later in the day, Stephen Jackson, director of equity and antiracism at the Oak Park Public Library, led what he called an “interactive engagement” with an audience of about 70 people, largely faculty and staff, entitled “Building a Global Community: Honoring the Past, Present and the Future.” Jackson, who has a background in social work, encouraged audience dialogue and touched on topics such as the history of the holiday, the existence of slavery in the American prison system (permitted under the language of the 13th Amendment), and the concept of post-traumatic slave syndrome and its impacts within modern society.

“Trauma isn’t uncommon when we talk about our nation,” Jackson noted. “The traumatic history of this nation has many different authors and many don’t represent the people who were mistreated.”

He concluded by encouraging the crowd to talk to the older members of their families and “get their stories.”

“The reality is, these are the people who know our history,” Jackson said. “If we don’t get their stories, the narrative isn’t going to belong to us.”

Dominican’s Juneteenth festivities were sponsored by the Justice, Equity, and Inclusion (JEI) Office, Rebecca Crown Library, Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation (TRHT), the Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence (CTLE), the Center for Cultural Liberation (CCL), and Student Involvement. 

For background and resources on Juneteenth, check out Rebecca Crown Library’s African American Studies page.