From Doing It Local:
Bridgeport Celebrates Juneteenth
Bridgeport marked Juneteenth today with a celebration of freedom, culture, history, and community.
Juneteenth commemorates June 19, 1865, when enslaved people in Galveston, Texas learned they were free, more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation had been signed. The day has since become a time to reflect on the end of slavery in the United States while also celebrating Black history, achievement, family, and community pride.
In Bridgeport, the holiday brought people together to honor that history while enjoying music, food, vendors, fellowship, and family-friendly activities. For many, Juneteenth is both a celebration and a reminder of the long road toward equality, justice, and opportunity.
The holiday is now recognized nationally, but in Bridgeport, Juneteenth remains deeply local: a day for neighbors, families, community groups, and local leaders to come together, remember the past, and celebrate the strength of the community today.
Juneteenth Celebration, I Did Not Come to Be Polite
I came to the Juneteenth celebration at the Margaret E. Morton Government Center wearing a T-shirt meant to do what Juneteenth itself is supposed to do: draw attention to the freedom work still unfinished. My shirt showed the governor’s image with a demand for a $17,000 ECS foundation, because symbolic recognition of Black freedom means little if Black and brown children are still educated under a funding formula frozen in inequity.
I did not arrive planning to disrupt. I came intending to bear witness. Intead, I found myself standing in a perverse civic dystopia. A Juneteenth celebration, a holiday born from delayed freedom was taking place in front of the very government center tied to Bridgeport’s struggles over power, education, and representation. The celebration was supposed to be about freedom, resilience, culture, and community. But freedom without equity is not complete.
The mayor and governor appeared, and elected officials were gathered to be recognized and offered the opportunity to give remarks. Before the governor and mayor spoke the looked at my shirt and sneered briefly. Then put back on his mask before speaking. Both he and the mayor spent a portion of their time patting themselves and each other on the back for their “contributions”. As an elected official with intimate knowledge of how they have both hurt the black and brown community thorough their policies on education and by campaign operatives in elections.
So when I spoke, I did what I always do. I told people what they needed to hear, that uncomfortable truth to power. We do not need another study to tell us what is wrong. We already know what is wrong. Connecticut’s education funding system is broken. Bridgeport’s children do not need another study they need fully funded schools. They need librarians. They need staff. They need a foundation amount that reflects real costs and racial equity. And they need a governor that does not create false narratives to withhold $5 million already identified as relief for Bridgeport children.
The hypocrisy was unbearable. Juneteenth commemorates delayed emancipation, people being free in law, but kept waiting. And there we were, in Bridgeport, still waiting, waiting for education justice, waiting for the Governor to stop studying harm he has caused and start repairing it. Put an end to urban and rural districts waiting for the money to be released, waiting for a funding formula that does not hide racial inequities behind complicated underfunded poorly weighted formulas.
Just after my remarks, I overheard the mayor speaking privately to a member of the city councilor. They stood about a yard to my left. The mayor characterized my remarks as inappropriate.
If anything was inappropriate, it was not my refusal to stay silent. What was inappropriate was watching two white males one a Governor in a state that has never had a governor of color and the other a mayor (elected in two consecutive elections in questionable circumstances) stand at a Juneteenth celebration beneath the shadow of Lewis Latimer’s statue, a statue honoring a Black inventor whose contributions to modern light were long under-recognized, while Bridgeport’s Black and brown children still sit inside an education system denied the resources they deserve through chronic underfunding perpetuated during both these leaders entire tenures.
What felt inappropriate was standing at city hall where an absentee ballot drop box became a national symbol of Bridgeport’s election scandal. That ballot box, in the shadow of the Morton center became part of the story of how Bridgeport was kept from the possibility of electing a mayor of color in two consecutive contests clouded by absentee-ballot controversy.
What felt inappropriate was remembering that Bridgeport has had two consecutive mayoral contests involving candidates of color, Marilyn Moore in 2019 and John Gomes in 2023. Elections tainted by absentee-ballot controversy. The 2023 Gomes primary was overturned; the 2019 Moore race was not overturned. Criminal charges were tied to alleged absentee-ballot misconduct in Bridgeport’s 2019 and 2023 Democratic primaries and while guilty pleas were entered and others await trial.
So no, I do not apologize for calling out the governor. Or rather, let me offer the apology this moment deserves:
I apologize to the event organizers, not for telling the truth, but for the fact that the truth had to be spoken there at all. I apologize that a celebration of freedom had to share space with the ongoing reality of educational neglect. I apologize that the state and local leadership has made it possible for a Juneteenth stage to become the place where someone had to remind elected leaders that freedom is not a one day celebration, equity is not a campaign slogan, and justice is not another time consuming study.
If Juneteenth means anything, it means delayed freedom must be named. In Connecticut’s Black and Brown cities delayed education funding is delayed freedom, and in Bridgeport elections stolen from people of color is designed to allow freedom to be delayed even longer.
My remarks were not inappropriate to Juneteenth. They were Juneteenth. Freedom delayed, justice deferred, and a city still waiting for the state to stop celebrating equity and start funding it.