Florence Juneteenth event celebrates history, community

A celebration in Florence on Thursday highlighted local service agencies, businesses, culture and history in honor of Juneteenth, a federal holiday commemorating the final delivery of news of emancipation to Black Americans in 1865.

This was the event’s third year, and it focused on the theme of “family reunion,” said event organizer Sienna Thompson. Thompson is also the co-founder and CEO of an organization called For Family by Family, which focuses on creating cross-institutional partnerships.

“We want the businesses and resources to meet the community where they’re at, finally come to them,” said Thompson.

The event took place at the Florence Nature Park and Event Center and featured rows of tents occupied by local vendors and service providers.

It also featured art showcases, scholarship awards, food, music and information about the history of slavery and the Underground Railroad in Boone County, courtesy of the Boone County Public Library.

Much of the county’s Black history was either not recorded or lost to time, said Boone County Public Library Archivist and Researcher Hillary Delaney.

Slavery was completely legal in Boone County before emancipation, but the county’s proximity to Indiana and Ohio, both free states, made it ripe for escape attempts. Much of Dulaney’s work focuses on restoring and preserving lost history for posterity.

The library started a Boone County Underground Railroad bus tour in 2013 that later blossomed into a larger research project documenting the history of the Underground Railroad in the county.

The project was later made a part of the National Park Service’s Underground Railroad Network to Freedom, which seeks to preserve the history of the movement.

“We have a lot of information here about not only Black history in Florence but Boone County as a whole,” Delaney said. ” Our research often takes us outside of Boone County because we have people who escaped or moved away, migrations to new places.”

Dulaney worked to discover the identities of unmarked graves for more than 120 Black community members, nearly half of whom were born into enslavement, in the African American Section of the Florence Cemetery.

The others were church and community leaders, landowners and men who served during the Civil War in the United States Colored Troops. The library was later honored with an award for their work, and a memorial was erected in commemoration of the people buried there.

The cemetery is the burial site for some of the trustees of the old First Baptist Church on Girard Street, an African American church that stopped operating in the 1980s. The City of Florence is currently working on restoring it.

Health information also featured prominently in the event. Most notably, St. Elizabeth’s Yung Family Cancer Center & Breast Center was informing the community of its See, Test & Treat day, scheduled for Oct. 11, where uninsured people from Kentucky, Indiana and Ohio can get free pap smears and mammograms (learn more about the event here).

“We do know that women who don’t have insurance have more barriers,” said Oncologist Brenda Burns. “A lot of women have worse outcomes for breast and cervical cancer because of that.”

Other groups at the event included the Florence Fire and Police Departments, local day cares, civic and political groups and artists.

“We celebrate freedom,” Thompson said. “We celebrate family. We celebrate the future.”

Check out some photos of the event below.