Betty Sawyer has been organizing celebrations of Juneteenth in Utah for 35 years — and the event which commemorates the end of slavery in the United States, remains important to “help build a sense of community and unity,” she said.
“A lot of folks, when you first come to Utah, you think about Utah, you don’t think about African culture, people, all of that,” said Sawyer, who is executive director of the nonprofit Project Success Coalition and president of the NAACP’s Ogden chapter. “But once you get here, you find out that Utah has a strong and vibrant history, and Blacks have a strong and vibrant history in the state of Utah.”
Highlighting that history for future generations, Sawyer said, has become key to celebrating Juneteenth.
Sawyer’s Project Success Coalition, which serves Utah’s African American community, will host the 35th annual Juneteenth Freedom and Heritage Festival, Saturday and Sunday, noon to 9 p.m., at the Ogden Amphitheater, 343 E. 25th St., Ogden.
“Juneteenth represents another opportunity to celebrate our freedom,” Sawyer said, adding that the awareness of Juneteenth has become more prevalent in recent years since it became a federal and state holiday.
The holiday’s history, she noted, traces to Galveston, Texas, where enslaved Black people were told in June 1865 about the Emancipation Proclamation — 2½ years after President Abraham Lincoln signed it.
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Betty Sawyer, director of Project Success Coalition, at the Juneteenth Freedom and Heritage Festival in 2021. The 2024 edition of the Juneteenth celebration is set for June 15-16, 2024, at Ogden Amphitheater in Ogden.
“Even though it celebrates that freedom of those who were formerly enslaved, again, none of us are free until all of us are free,” she said.
The first time Sawyer celebrated Juneteenth, she said, was 36 years ago in Salt Lake City’s Jordan Park, with her brother-in-law. In Maryland, where she grew up, they didn’t call it Juneteenth — but committed specific days to celebrating such figures as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, she said.
The year after her first Juneteenth, Sawyer said there was difficulty in reserving a park. She reached out to Maurice White, a friend in Ogden, to see if they could hold the event there.
“‘He says, ‘Yes, come on up’ — and that started my journey with actually implementing and directing the Juneteenth festival 35 years ago. I’ve been doing it ever since,” Sawyer said.
This year’s Juneteenth festival will include food, drinks and educational activities. Sawyer pointed out that the event will feature spoken word performances, opportunities for youth to showcase their talents, basketball and more.
The event is free to the public, but donations to PSC will be accepted. Two featured events are a “barber battle” and a “crown braid battle.” “We’ve invited barbers from across the state to come and showcase their creativity and craftsmanship,” Sawyer said.
Live music is also featured, with local and national performing artists such as headliner and rapper J. Holiday on Saturday and the George Brown Jazz Ensemble, Myron Butler and Zenobia Smith on Sunday. Local artists include Gavanni, Kimi, Doumie and more.
Nick Fonesca, from R&R Entertainment, is in charge of the festival’s entertainment. He said the entertainment for the festival is diverse: “clean and up-tempo, featuring family-oriented music.”
The musical acts span such genres as jazz, gospel, Afrobeats, hip hop and R&B.
“The artists that we’ve selected to be on this show are literally the top of the top artists of Salt Lake,” he said. The entertainment lineup, he added, coincides with the overall themes of Juneteenth, especially when it comes to freedom of speech and youth engagement.
“A lot of these artists have come through the Project Coalition Success mentorship,” Fonesca said, “and use Juneteenth’s platform to elevate their brands and get their music out there.”
Sawyer noted that “even though [Juneteenth] is honoring the end of enslavement in our country, it is something for all of us to honor and celebrate. … It’s not just a Black thing, it’s for all of us.”
