BY DANIEL SCHMIDT
THE OBSERVER
OPELIKA — Despite humid weather and heavy cloud cover, hundreds packed downtown Opelika to celebrate Juneteenth, the holiday marking when the last enslaved Black Americans in Texas learned they were free on June 19, 1865, with a vibrant celebration.
For Henrietta Snipes, one of the celebration’s longtime organizers, the work behind Friday’s event began long before the first vendor arrived, and planning for next year started almost as soon as the music stopped.
“This is a historical event, it’s not just a fun event where people come out and have fun,” Snipes said. “While we want everybody to have fun, we also have to figure out how to turn this into a learning moment. So we go in and we come up with a theme, and it’s a lot of hard work. Thirty people do this, but fortunately for us, we have such a good team.”
The biggest hurdle, she said, has been money.
In the early years organizers paid out of their own pockets before realizing that wasn’t sustainable and beginning to ask for support.
The city council, she said, was among the first to step up.
She recalled how far the celebration has come. It started with about 15 people and once included a parade that marched from a church to Courthouse Square.
Since then, the event has taken a life of its own and become more commonly recognized around Opelika and Lee County as a whole.
“Once we got started today, I’ve been in tears,” Snipes said of the increasing recognition. “I’m so proud to be from Opelika and Lee County. When we first started, nobody had a clue what Juneteenth was. Today, if you got on Facebook, pretty much every government entity in this county recognized it in some type of way.”
The history Snipes wants preserved is the one Opelika City Council Ward 2 Council Member Janataka Hughley-Holmes recited from memory.
The Emancipation Proclamation, she noted, was signed about two and a half years before word of freedom finally reached enslaved people in Texas.
“Imagine two and a half years, you being free with somebody still holding you in captivity,” Hughley-Holmes said. “It is American history, and so we all should come out and celebrate.”
Hughley-Holmes estimated 400 to 500 people were already on the square before the event’s official 5:30 p.m. start, with more expected.
She said she was especially pleased to see civic organizations registering voters, calling it important for residents to cast a ballot regardless of party.
She also described a larger ambition: a county-wide Juneteenth celebration spanning Lee County.
“I’m very pleased with the different organizations that’s out here,” Hughley-Holmes said. “I supported [Auburn’s Juneteenth celebrations] last week, and some of their officials are here to support ours tonight. One day the overall vision is to try and have a county-wide Juneteenth celebration. But I’m excited for how far we’ve come.”
The Opelika event was launched in 2020 and has grown every year. Hughley-Holmes said she had attended a neighboring community’s celebration the week before.
Among the vendors, Cathy Newkirk sold baked goods with Essie’s Sweet Treats.
This year, according to Newkirk, the day carried more personal weight as she reflected on her family’s history and on the state of the country.
“I will make sure that for my children and my grandchildren, the history will not be lost from them,” Newkirk said. “We have to be encouraged, and we have to go on, and we can’t let anything hinder us. We have to go forward.”
She then framed Juneteenth as shared ground.
Black history, she said, is American history, and she urged people of all backgrounds to talk, show compassion and get to know one another rather than grow more distant.
Newkirk, who said she is often the only minority at some events she attends, said she goes anyway because meeting people from different cultures is how people learn and grow.
However, the commemoration stretched well beyond the square.
Across town at the historic St. Luke African Methodist Episcopal Church, organizers set up a voter registration drive timed to catch people traveling to and from the downtown festivities.
At St. Luke, Aredene Thomas worked the registration tables with a simple refrain: your vote is your voice.
Thomas, who hosts the community talk show “Let’s Talk,” said she routinely registers new voters and helps others restore rights they had lost, including people returning from incarceration.
She and other community members hold voter registration events about once a month, and they positioned themselves at the church to reach drivers headed to the downtown celebration.
The choice of venue was also personal.
St. Luke, built in 1913, is on both the Opelika and state historic registries, and proceeds from the church’s collective Juneteenth efforts will go toward its restoration.
“We’re trying to keep her around for another 100 years,” Thomas said.
She added that after spending all of her 57 years at the church, the restoration effort was deeply personal to her.
Thomas also said that teaching young people their history feels urgent.
“The truth is under attack,” Thomas said, explaining that she feels some are trying to whitewash the past. “It’s very important for [the younger generations] to know their history, and that is something that’s important for us individually. At the church, it’s also something that we focus on [collectively], and that’s something that we’ll focus on this Juneteenth.”
The church’s own Juneteenth celebration, its fifth annual, is set for Saturday, June 27, under the theme “embracing our legacy to inspire our future.”
As the official start time neared and the threatened rain held off, organizers across both sites said they hoped the day would do what Juneteenth was meant to do: bring people together, register more voters and ensure the history behind the holiday is passed on.
Together, the gatherings reflected a day that organizers said is meant to be equal parts celebration, history lesson and call to civic action.
And even though the celebration just ended, work has already begun on next year’s Juneteenth with earnestness.
“We start tomorrow preparing for Juneteenth 2027,” Snipes said. “We’ve already figured out best and worst practices from tonight, and we automatically start going in and doing what we have to have next year.”
