Two Histories in One Park

A Juneteenth essay from Hutchinson, Kansas. Friday Binding takes a different shape this week.

Late spring in Hutchinson, Kansas, somewhere around 1978. I was four, maybe five. Me, my older brother Tony, my mom Stephen (yes, spelled like a man’s, pronounced Steff-an). We’d be at the fountain near the entrance to Carey Park, at the end of Main Street. My dad would come home from work and we’d race down Park Street or in the alley behind our house. My mom ran. I remember thinking she was fast.

When it got dark we’d walk back to the fountain. At night it glowed. The water lit from underneath in colors I can still see. Other people were around. Music played. “Afternoon Delight” had been on the radio for two summers by then, and what I remember best was the line skyrockets in flight and the smell of late spring tipping into early summer in central Kansas.

I didn’t know then that my hometown had a complicated history. I found that out as an adult.

Years later I remember being at Sylvan Park, now George Pyle Park, for Emancipation Day. Those memories are blurrier than the fountain ones. The gazebo at the center of that park is the same one President Harding stood at in June 1923, talking to white farmers about federal farm relief. The same gazebo my family walked past going to celebrate the end of slavery. Two histories in one park. As a kid, I only knew one of them.

I had Black friends in Hutchinson. A lot of them. But I was usually the only Black kid in the places I spent my time. Silver Maple Church Camp every summer. The high school swim team. Some school activities, most weekday afternoons. My friendships lived in church, in family, in the neighborhood. But in many cases, I was the one in the room.

Here is what I want you to take away from this piece. Hutchinson kept a freedom celebration alive for more than 130 years before the country found Juneteenth. The town never waited for federal permission. Now both calendars sit in the same small city: an August tradition built by Black Kansans and carried by their grandchildren, and a June holiday signed into federal law in 2021. This piece is about what that town taught me, what it kept, and what it hands forward.

The August Tradition

In 1889, organizers moved the Kansas Emancipation Festival from Atchison to Hutchinson so Black Kansans across the state could reach it from a central spot. They held it in early August. Parades, picnics, dances, sports. Over the decades it became a homecoming, the weekend when families who had scattered came back to the same parks and the same tables.

The town made it official early. In 1931, Mayor Oswald proclaimed August 4 “a legal holiday for all members of the Negro race in the city of Hutchinson.” By mid-century the weekend ran on a recognizable rhythm: a parade down Main Street to open it, then baseball, basketball tournaments, boxing, beauty and talent contests, and evening dances. Local sponsors booked real talent. The Lionel Hampton Orchestra played one of those dances.

Then the town’s attention thinned. By the late twentieth century, Hutchinson’s Black community sat around three percent of the city, and the August weekend ran on the labor of the Hutchinson Emancipation Day Committee and a handful of elders. The city’s role shrank to parade permits and park reservations. The newspaper covered it in small briefs, when it covered it at all. The tradition held anyway. That’s the part I loved the most: it held anyway.

My mom, Stephen, raising my brother and me through those years, remembers it from inside. “The only thing I can remember about Emancipation Day in Hutch is the parade, the food, and baseball till all hours of the night,” she told me. “And of course the heat! Wish I had more.” Baseball into the night. That’s a community letting a day stretch.

Two Names for One Freedom

Emancipation Day and Juneteenth name the same freedom through different doors. Hutchinson’s August date came west with the festival from Atchison and stayed put for over a century. Juneteenth marks June 19, 1865, the day Union soldiers reached Galveston, Texas, and told the last enslaved people there that they were free. Texas families carried that date north and west for generations. The federal government caught up in 2021.

So pin the terms the way the town now lives them. In Hutchinson, Emancipation Day means the August homecoming: 130-plus years old, built and carried by local Black families, held through every decade the rest of the town looked away. Juneteenth means the national June holiday, brought to Hutchinson in 2020 by NAACP youth who connected their hometown tradition to the country’s. Same freedom. Different inheritance routes. The question a town like Hutchinson has to answer is how to hold both without letting either one thin out.

The Drum Line

I called my friend Chad. We grew up together in Hutchinson. He stayed close to the town in ways I didn’t, and he remembers the August weekend in his body.

“What I remember most about emancipation is that they would always have a Black band marching with great drum rhythms and beats,” he told me. “The rhythm always took me.” He was five or six the year that lodged, so probably 1980 or 1981. The band came down the parade route, and the kid on the curb felt the bass line in his chest. That’s where Chad’s memory of Emancipation Day starts.

The Rest of the Year

I don’t have a single sharp memory of an Emancipation Day I attended as a kid. The August gatherings at Sylvan Park blur. Picnic tables, music, adults laughing in a way I’d see all year but in fewer numbers at any one time. What I have sharper memories of is the rest of the year.

Silver Maple Church Camp every summer. My crew was me and two friends. One was white. The other was something else, maybe Native, maybe mixed. We never knew exactly what. The three of us moved through every camp activity in formation. The world inside that crew is what I remember, not what was outside it.

Then the high school swim team. I came to the sport new. At one meet I started my backstroke while still underwater. People joked they could see my fingertips poking up through the water mid-stroke. There was another guy on the team who’d been swimming his whole life. At practice I’d push off the wall a full pool length ahead of him, and he’d still be at my heels by the time I touched the other end.

At camp and on the team I was the only Black kid in the room. At Sylvan Park in August I wasn’t.

Chad’s rest of the year ran on different ground. He was an athlete, and what he calls church-heavy. “I was very competitive, so I was always excited for [the tournaments],” he says. The August weekend slotted right into that life. “There would always be competition sports going on, three-on-three basketball, horseshoes. This basically tied into everything else because I was church-heavy as a child, and all the churches would be present.”

That’s the difference between us. The August weekend was relief for me, the one room where I wasn’t the only one. For Chad it was concentration. Everything he already lived inside, gathered in one park. Same celebration. Two inheritances.

Leaving, and Watching

I left Hutchinson in 1993, when I joined the Marine Corps. Twenty-three years in uniform took me a long way from Reno County. I never stopped following the town. Visits and phone calls at first. Then the internet made it easy: local news, community pages, the faces I grew up with posting from the same parks where we played.

I want to be straight with the reader about what that means for this piece. What I know firsthand ends around high school. After that, my lines back to Hutchinson run through my mom, my brother, friends like Chad, and the screens that brought them all closer. The town we follow on those screens still keeps the dates we grew up inside, and watching it keep them is its own kind of belonging.

Chad stayed closer than I did. That’s part of why I called him.

The Hand-Off

In 2020, the country’s reckoning after George Floyd’s death sent Juneteenth into the national bloodstream, and Hutchinson’s NAACP Youth Council decided their town should have one. They launched the first Hutchinson Juneteenth that June, drawing more than 200 people to Chester I. Lewis Plaza for food, music, performances, and voter registration. NAACP Youth advisor Heather Jobe put the connection plainly: “Here in Hutchinson, we are very familiar with emancipation.” It gets celebrated the first weekend in August, she told Hutch Post. The kids saw the line between their town’s old tradition and the country’s new holiday, and they drew it.

The federal holiday came in 2021. The city followed fast: an annual mayoral proclamation, the Human Relations Office as co-sponsor, formal City Council recognition by 2024. The June weekends grew into multi-day lineups. A youth talent show at Chester I. Lewis Plaza, opening remarks from the mayor, a free community BBQ. Health screening fairs run by local hospitals. Bounce houses. Crowds in the thousands, in a town where the August picnics once drew a few hundred families.

And the August weekend kept going, with the parade down Main, the community picnic, the dance, and GospelFest intact. The youth who built Juneteenth added a second date and pulled the city’s institutions toward both, instead of replacing the elders’ tradition. Jobe says running a public festival teaches the teens how to connect with mayors, council members, and business owners, civic skills no classroom covers. And she keeps the stakes in front of the crowd: “Civil rights is not done.”

What’s Thinned

Chad has been watching the August weekend change. “What has changed that’s most notable to me is the funding for it,” he says. “There is not a variety of food anymore, just hot dogs. We don’t get the good marching bands anymore. And we as the people don’t support like we did when I was a kid.”

That last line hits me different than the first two. Resources thin. Marching bands stop coming. Those are things that happen to a celebration. The third thing happens inside the people who hold it. The kid who fell for the drum rhythm at five or six grew up to watch the bands stop coming, and the community shows up smaller every year, and he names all three.

The Power of Words

My older brother Tony is in the opening scene of this piece, the kid running races with me on Park Street outside the Carey Park fountain. He remembers something I don’t. “I think I remember a parade with the first Black Miss Hutchinson on one of the floats or in an open car,” he wrote. He isn’t sure if the next memory was Emancipation Day or another event, but he remembers being at the park on B Street, the one with the pavilion. Someone was dressed as Frederick Douglass, reciting one of his speeches. The kids got to meet with him afterward. He stayed in character. Tony writes: “I think that was my first awareness of the power of words.”

Tony says he wishes he could remember more clearly. My mom said the same about her memories. I said it about mine. None of us remembers it whole. That’s the texture of how a community holds a tradition across decades. Not in one person’s mind. In fragments scattered across many.

That’s what these celebrations were doing in a small Kansas town. They were teaching kids what words could do. The drum line for Chad. Frederick Douglass speaking through a re-enactor for Tony. Different doorways into the same room. The August weekend was a curriculum. Black elders in Hutchinson teaching the next generation what they had kept alive.

What Gets Passed Forward

A town that is three percent Black held a freedom celebration through segregation, through the decades when the paper gave it two column inches, through years when the city’s whole contribution was a parade permit. The elders who organized it didn’t ask whether the country was ready. They put the date on the calendar and kept it there.

The kids who launched Juneteenth in 2020 did the same work in the other direction. They saw the country move and pulled their town into the current without dropping the August thread. Two calendars now. One freedom. The work, as Heather Jobe says, is not done.

Hutchinson knows how to keep a date. The elders did it. The youth are doing it. The question Chad points out, whether we as the people still support the way we did when we were kids, is the one this piece can’t answer from California. It’s the one the town has to answer every year.

I’m proud of where I came from. Hutchinson wasn’t perfect. Many of its people did the best they could with what they knew. That’s the inheritance. That’s what gets passed forward.

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Jerry W. Washington, Ed.D., grew up in Hutchinson, Kansas. He served twenty-three years in the United States Marine Corps. He writes What Time Binds.