Freedom celebrated throughout Pottstown for Juneteenth

Senagalese drummer Sangue Mboup performed and told stories Saturday as part of Pottsgrove Manor’s Juneteenth Celebration Saturday. (Evan Brandt — MediaNews Group)

POTTSTOWN — It was a little hard to keep track of all the freedom being celebrated Saturday in the borough.

No less than four events, and perhaps more, were held to mark the day the last enslaved people in America were informed they had been freed.

Inside the Caribbean restaurant Welcome to the Avenue Saturday morning, the STRIVE Initiative’s Created for Greatness podcast hosted and episode with Pottstown High School students named “What Does Freedom Mean to You?”

While that was occurring, organizers of the downtown Juneteenth were setting up in Smith Family Plaza for the six-hour-long celebration there, which also closed High Street for a block.

“It’s going to be a good day,” said Denise Williams CEO of Be ReZilient Healing Through The Arts and one of the event’s organizers. “This event is an opportunity for us to come together, support local businesses and nonprofits, and appreciate the vibrant arts scene that Pottstown has to offer.”

The theme of this year’s celebration was “Celebrate Our Resilience.”

Food, clothing, drinks, music, art, nonprofit groups and swag to support another celebration of freedom, the upcoming GoFourth Festival on July 4th, were all to be had in Smith Family Plaza.

Just a three blocks away, the home of Pottstown founder John Potts was ringing with the sound of Senagalese drums as drummer and performer Sangue Mboup used music to talk about the history of slavery in Senegal.

Mboup, who speaks Wolof, taught the audience a song about two men who speak different languages, as is sometimes the case in Senegal, but worked together to become “the best of friends.”

Also on hand was Dan Flickinger, whose family adopted and now helps to preserve the African Union Church of South Coventry.

The cemetery, near where he grew up, is linked to one of America’s first interventions in the slave trade, when, in 1800, the USS Ganges intercepted and captured two ships carrying enslaved people to the Caribbean. The captain of that ship, John Malory, at one point lived in Pottstown in a home at High and Hanover streets.

The 135 captured Africans, most of whom were under 18, were brought to Philadelphia where the Quakers help to settle them into trades through indenture agreements which, from the perspective of the Africans, was little different from slavery.

But after a decade, most had earned their freedom and learned a trade, including an individual named Talia, who had been captured at age 12. He spent some time working at the Glasgow Forge operated by Pottstown founder and early industrialist John Pottstown, eventually changing his name and buying his own farm on Rattlesnake Hill Road in Douglass (Berks).

Smith went on to help found the African Union Church of South Coventry as well as Bethel AME Church in Pottstown, Flickinger said.

For years, the church in South Coventry flourished, located as it was in a small community of free Black Americans that lived along Coventryville Road. But the last of the roughly 20 people buried there was laid to rest in 1872.

In another twist, it was discovered in the 1960s that there was an accumulating tax bill on the abandoned property and Marjorie Potts Wendell, a descendant of John Potts, paid the tax bill and had it removed from the tax rolls and listed as a cemetery, Flickinger said.

Yet another Juneteenth celebration was held Saturday afternoon at the Ricketts Community Center.

Here again, food, clothing, gifts and music marked the day.

The Juneteenth holiday, sometimes called Freedom Day, has its roots in President Abraham Lincoln’s revered Emancipation Proclamation.

On Jan. 1, 1863, Lincoln announced: “All persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.”

But because Texas was never occupied by federal troops, all those enslaved in the Lone Star State were not freed and did not even know about the proclamation.

It was not until June 19, 1865, that “Union Army Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger stepped onto a balcony in Galveston, Texas – two months after the Civil War had ended — and announced that more than 250,000 enslaved people in Texas were free,” according to the Washington Post.

The celebration that began there has been spreading ever since.

It gained a major boost in 2021 when it became a federal holiday in the wake of the millions who marched in the streets in 2020 for racial justice in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.