by Lauren J. Mapp, excerpted from San Diego Tides and Tacos
Photo by Lauren J. Mapp
Growing up as part of the Cooper family in San Diego, celebrating Juneteenth Day was a huge part of 26-year-old Maliya Jones’ upbringing.
Many of her non-Black friends sometimes questioned why she made a big deal about a holiday they had otherwise never heard of.
“They were like, ‘That’s crazy, because you always talk about Juneteenth, you always talk about your family,” Jones said.
But for years before Juneteenth had been recognized as a holiday by the federal or California state government, Jones’ family had organized a large annual festival to celebrate the abolition of slavery.
It was more than 50 years ago when her grandparents, Sidney and Thelma Cooper, first started hosting Juneteenth celebrations in San Diego, initially as a small event among family and friends.
Sidney, who was lovingly known as the “Mayor of Imperial Avenue” had wanted to bring the tradition he celebrated at home in Oklahoma with him to San Diego to foster community connections.
“Sidney Cooper brought awareness of Juneteenth to San Diego and pioneered celebrations decades before its federal recognition,” Jones said of her grandfather. “He fostered unity among the Southeast San Diego community by establishing internal and external relationships in the community.”
More than five decades later, the Juneteenth festival has grown into a large annual festival drawing in musical performers, dancers, vendors and guests from throughout the region.
Although she now lives in Las Vegas, working as a health program specialist, Jones serves as an event coordinator for the Cooper Family Foundation and its annual Juneteenth celebration. Her trips home to celebrate the holidays with her community are often marked by sharing the foods she associates with the holiday.
“Black eyed peas, pulled pork, cornbread,” Jones said, “things like that just show the resilience of the black people and what they faced.”
History of Juneteenth
Also known as Jubilee Day or Liberation Day, Juneteenth — a portmanteau of the words “June” and “nineteenth” — celebrates the end of slavery in the United States and is considered the oldest observed African American holiday.
Despite the Emancipation Proclamation to abolish slavery being issued in 1862 and the Civil War ending in April 1865, news of slavery’s end was delayed in its spread to communities across the country. It wasn’t until June 19, 1865 when Union Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas to announce the proclamation that the state’s 250,000 enslaved people were freed by executive decree, sparking the celebration that led to the national holiday.
For more than a century, Juneteenth was primarily celebrated by Black families and communities, like the celebration held each year in San Diego by the Cooper Family Foundation, but it started gaining more recognition in the 21st Century.
Since 2017, California has observed Juneteenth as a state holiday, and President Joe Biden signed it into law in 2021, making it a federal holiday. Last year, the San Diego City Council voted unanimously to make the celebration a paid, annual holiday for city workers.
Juneteenth foods
In the more than 150 years since Juneteenth was first celebrated, certain foods have become associated with celebration of the holiday.
Black food writer and historian Michael Twitty said that often families will prepare red foods — the color representing the blood shed in slavery — including red punch or soda, watermelon, red velvet cake and reddish brown baked beans.
But Twitty — who is teaching an Atlas Obscura course on the culinary journey from West and Central Africa to the American South — said red also shows the connections between the freed slaves who first celebrated Juneteenth in 1865 and the Yoruba and Congo communities.
“There were people in Texas who came over on the slave ship as late as the 1830s,” Twitty said. He added that red is the color of Aṣẹ, the Yoruba philosophy behind the power to make things happen and produce change.
Other foods can include barbecue and dishes thought to bring good luck, such as collard greens and black eyed peas, both of which are also frequently served in Black families to celebrate the New Year.
But just as there is not one experience or viewpoint that encompasses every Black American, there is no one right way to celebrate Jubilee Day.
Back in New Orleans, Chef Quinnton Austin and his community had no shortage of events to celebrate throughout the year.
There were the Super Sunday parades and Mardi Gras during the Carnival season, holidays with Caribbean and Haitian influence, and second-lines, parades led by jazz musicians to celebrate weddings and mourn deaths in the community. One thing all those events have in common is the inclusion of flavorful dishes.
“New Orleans is a majority Black city, so we didn’t have to try hard to show our Blackness,” Austin said.
Even when there aren’t holidays or events to celebrate, the city has plenty of foods outside the stereotypical beignets and gumbo widely available to enjoy as major cultural touchstones for New Orleans.
“There’s a snowball stand on every other corner, there’s the candy lady on every other corner, there’s the candy truck,” Austin said of his old neighborhood. “You could get taffy, proper pecan candy, pralines, ooey gooey cake, pecan pies, you can get all that stuff.”
But after moving out to San Diego from New Orleans in 2018, Austin saw how the community gathered in celebration of Juneteenth.
Now, he honors the holiday each year by serving the dishes his customers crave at both of his restaurants, Louisiana Purchase in North Park and Q & A Restaurant & Oyster Bar in Oceanside.
“I feel like if they come here, it’s the catfish, the fried chicken and this year, I might do a boil,” Austin said. “I feel like that’s the typical foods that a lot of people gravitate toward for Juneteenth.”
At Louisiana Purchase in North Park, Chef Quinnton Austin serves foods from his hometown of New Orleans, like the gumbo pictured here. Photo by Lauren J. Mapp
As a kid in Cincinnati, Loren Cobbs wasn’t raised with the tradition of Juneteenth, but as a teenager she started observing the holiday after making friends with people from the South who grew up celebrating it.
After founding SD Melanin in 2017 to curate experiences to build community for professionals of color, Cobbs’ organization started hosting events in honor of Juneteenth. What started as a series of smaller events and dinners has grown into the Kinfolk Fest, which welcomes thousands of attendees to celebrate Juneteenth at Waterfront Park each year.
Since Juneteenth wasn’t celebrated in her family, Cobbs said she associates the foods her family ate at other family events with the holiday.
“Soul food or barbecue is the type of food I would expect at any Black American celebration,” she said. “There’s going to be somebody on the grill, unless it’s cold outside, there’s going to be someone who makes mac and cheese, somebody’s going to make potato salad, somebody’s going to make baked beans, but baked beans with the meat, the onions, the brown or red beans, or some kind of sweet component, somebody’s going to make a pound cake.
For Loren Cobbs, no celebration of Juneteenth or any other holiday is complete without a serving of mac and cheese. Pictured here is the carbonara mac and cheese from Books & Records in Banker’s Hill. Photo by Lauren J. Mapp
No matter what cultural background someone comes from or how they choose to celebrate the holiday, Twitty said it’s most important that Juneteenth be celebrated by all Americans. Instead of viewing it solely as a Black holiday, he said it should be a national, teachable moment to show the interconnectedness of those from all ethnicities.
“There are a lot of people who think that whatever happened to Black people just happened to Black people and had no effect on Asian Americans, European immigrants, Indigenous people and the story of immigrants from Mexico,” Twitty said.
“But our history is connected to all of those histories, especially the exploitation of us in terms of labor and culture.”
