Juneteenth Music Festival Scales Down, Asks for Community Support

Last year's Juneteenth Music Festival was a success: two days of celebration with a parade, live music, a street fair and much more. This year, for the 59th anniversary of the Five Points event — and the 160th anniversary of Juneteenth itself — the festival is being scaled back to one day.

And to ensure that the event even happens on Sunday, June 15, organizers are asking for direct and urgent community support.

"We unfortunately had a good number of our larger corporate partners pull out," says executive director Norman Harris III. "Some of them have been involved for many years, but they just recently let us know that they'd be unable to participate this time. That didn't come with much in the way of explanation, but there are tea leaves that you can read in order to understand what the reason is behind it."

The city won't be able to come to the rescue, either. While it set up the Five Points Jazz Activation Fund, a grant program that replaced the annual Five Points Jazz Festival when that annual event was canceled, Harris says much of that funding has already been earmarked for other events. "The board is aware of the situation for sure, but our agreement with Denver Arts & Venues was pretty specific," Harris says.

So now Juneteenth organizers are urgently asking for donations through the Juneteenth Music Festival website. The JMF is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit whose mission is to galvanize and empower communities through events and programming that focus on the historical significance, observation and celebration of Juneteenth, which commemorates the day federal troops informed enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, that they were free: June 19, 1865.

Several corporate sponsors also dropped out of this year's event, but Harris demurs when it comes to naming names. "Not our style," he states. "Doing that wouldn't align with our values. We'd rather focus on the companies that are sticking with us, and celebrate them.

"It's really a sad thing, on both a professional and personal level," admits Harris, who's been leading the JMF since 2012. "You work with these people for years and you develop relationships. Friendships, even. And then this happens. It's been a difficult time, and a difficult decision. In the end, we decided that honoring the legacy of the event was the most important thing, so we made the hard pivot to pull back to one day."
It's natural for Harris to take this hit a little personally; his own history is rooted in Five Points and the Welton corridor, and he's not only the head of the JMF, but also executive director of the Five Points Business Improvement District and a co-owner of Spangalang Brewery at 2736 Welton Street. His passion likewise stems from his grandfather, Norman Harris Sr., who was, among many other things, the longtime proprietor of two liquor stores and the Wise Harris Arms on 26th and Welton, and a true pillar of the community.

But it also comes from his own memories of Juneteenth. "I've been going literally since I was born. My earliest memory of the festival is heading down there sometime in the early 1980s with a friend of mine — I'm really dating myself here," he says with a laugh, "but this was during the Breakdance era. We had our parachute pants on, and would come down to Juneteenth with flattened cardboard boxes and lay them out and do backspins. Everyone has little memories like that of Juneteenth. It's like a family reunion in some ways.

"Before social media and all that, this was one of the ways you came out and met your community," he adds. "I'm a little biased, but I think it's the best festival in the city. It's a cultural treasure chest. It highlights some of our city's best aspects, centered in African-American culture, and it's one of the defining elements of Five Points in Denver."

Still, crowd-sourcing funding for Juneteenth is a new enterprise. "We've never had to resort to asking the community for their direct support," says Harris. "But we're doing it because we recognize how important the festival is to people. So we're asking people to go to our website and donate what they can to keep this dream alive. And if they can't give financially, to help spread the word. The support and prayers of the people are needed this year, especially. And so appreciated, always."

Harris stresses that right now, especially, is an important time to support Juneteenth. "It's great for people to come down to Five Points to a free and open event with all the music and the vendors and the food and the programming," he says. "But the core of Juneteenth is freedom. And it seems like right now, a lot of the freedoms we've come to take for granted may well be at risk. How we respond to that — how we support this event in taking place and sending that message — is really what we're talking about here."

The Juneteenth Music Festival is scheduled for Sunday, June 15, at 2701 Welton Street. For VIP tickets and more information, see the Juneteenth Music Festival website.