“This is the best day ever, this is better than Christmas!” a young Black kid said to his family as they crossed into Harris Park. It was the first thing I heard after arriving from a long morning grabbing the last of the supplies for the Cookout.
How beautiful is that, I thought. A Black child walking into the unbridled, loving, joyous community of the Blackest holiday, a day built to celebrate the freedom of his people, and finding it bigger than Christmas. Free enough, held enough, that the liberation of his own people became the most exciting thing he could imagine.
It was a day of pure joy, and before it ended it would also ask us to grieve.
All around us, the day was alive. Dozens of Black vendors. Young brothers running the court. Comrades and community folding into each other’s arms, loving on each other freely. Black babies leaping through bouncy houses and riding horses with their whole bodies thrown open to joy. Liberation in the flesh, made plain for anyone willing to see it. What a wondrous day it was.
As we do every year, building this day hand in hand with our comrades at Decarcerate KC, the day opened with the voice of Shawn Taylor lifting the Black national anthem over the park, and for a moment the whole crowd stood inside that song together. When the last note settled, everything began at once.
The basketball tournament tipped off with a $500 cash prize and brothers playing like the whole summer depended on it. The grill at Wingz & Yak going steady. Fresh squeezed lemonade. Spicy seafood bowls. Soul food from Sissy’s Kitchen. Our people from the National Black United Front, the Ivanhoe Neighborhood Association, and Bliss Books & Wine, AIMWell Yoga and many more, all of us in one place, building the thing we keep saying is possible.
Halfway through, the official ceremony began. For the first time ever, we honored the inaugural RADAR Class, the soon to be released culture magazine from the Defender, built to document Kansas City’s growing national pull on the culture, from hip hop to fashion, from content creators to poets and comedians. We gave each Creator a moment to speak into the space. R3Z. SwitchesDaLabel. Whitney Manning. 816StickMan. Melissa Ferrer Civil. Among others who are shaping what this city sounds and looks and feels like.
And then I took a few moments to uplift the family of Saveion McConnell, who were with us that day. Saveion was a year out of high school at Lee’s Summit North, a young Black brother with his whole life still in front of him, when he was murdered in cold blood by the Lafayette County Police Department, rammed with their vehicle and then shot dead. We held a moment of silence.
We spoke his name into the open air so the whole park could carry it.
We asked everyone present to send blessing to his family, to speak grace over the people who loved him and now have to keep living without him. There is no joy we will ever hold that lets us forget why we fight.
And moving through all of it, were our comrades from Decarcerate KC, who build this Cookout alongside us every year. They are the only organization in this city whose explicit mission is to organize in the very tradition of abolition that freed our enslaved ancestors. When Kansas City set out to build three jails at once, it was Decarcerate KC who unearthed our memory and spoke the truth into the open, while our elected officials stayed entrenched in the same ideologies of enslavement and incarceration we have been fighting since the first of us was put in chains.
They refuse the lie that cages keep anyone safe. They know, the way our ancestors knew, that we keep us safe.
Then came the moment of political education.
“On Juneteenth we celebrate those who have died, who have bled, who have built this country with their own body,” Melissa Ferrer Civil, Director of Political Education at The Kansas City Defender, told the crowd. The air went still. Hundreds of us leaned in, holding her every word like something we already knew somewhere deep in the body.
“Often we don’t know our own history. The Juneteenth that we celebrate is the day the news finally made it to Galveston, Texas, that the slaves were free. We know the government didn’t free us though. Who did?” she asked. And the answer came back not as a whisper but as a vow, the whole crowd rising into it as one voice, “WE DID!”
As with every KC Defender and Decarcerate KC gathering, as much as we hold joy and love and one another close, we know our work is never finished without the truth pressed into the center of it. Remembrance. Militancy. Revolutionary spirit. The political education that turns a celebration into a reckoning.
That is what Melissa spoke into the space, and we carried it home in our chests.
And I thought again about that child at the gate. Somewhere behind him, generations back, was a child who never got a day like this. A child who was sold, or worked to death, or who ran. That child dreamed this park into being without ever seeing it. Every name we spoke, every pound of food, every shot that fell on that court, was a letter sent backward through time to say we made it, and we are still here, and we are still free, and we are still yours. That is what we handed him at the gate. The proof that the dream was not in vain.
So this is our prayer for him. May he never know a cage. May he grow tall in a city that fought to free him before he could even ask. May he learn the names we spoke today and add them to his own prayers. And may he live long enough to bring his own child to this park, on this holiday, and feel what we felt, which was the unmistakable presence of a people who refuse to die.
