OAKLAND — The small congregation sat perched atop a hill overlooking Lake Merritt, and when the drums began beating from under the hill, the lake took on a symbolic meaning: It represented the African side of the Atlantic Ocean, where millions of people were forcefully captured and shipped to America as slaves.
A crowd of more than 50 people — most of them dressed in all-white traditional garb — gathered for the 11th annual Juneteenth Ritual of Remembrance on Saturday afternoon to remember the struggles of their enslaved ancestors and the continued struggle since their freedom after the Civil War. The event was organized by the Omnira Institute, a small Oakland-based nonprofit whose mission, they say, is to revive the African roots of African-American cultural practices.
Juneteenth is a holiday commemorating June 19, 1865, when slaves in Texas heard for the first time President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation — more than two years after Lincoln, by then assassinated, proclaimed the abolition of slavery.
Other Juneteenth events will be held around the Bay Area next weekend, closer to the actual Juneteenth holiday. This ritual was different from others as it emphasizes prayer and celebration of pre-slavery traditions, according to organizer Wanda Ravernell.
“Juneteenth is like our Fourth of July,” Ravernell said. “What I thought I wanted to do was to honor our ancestors through prayers with the languages our ancestors spoke.”
Various languages and religions from Africa or from African roots were on display at the ceremony during its prayers, including Khemetic, a modern revival of Egyptian polytheism, and the West African religion Vodun. The initial drum procession by the lake, called Oro Egun, was a litany sung by African ancestors, according to Ravernell.
Abrahamic religions such as Judaism, Christianity and Islam were also part of the ceremony. Local clergy in all three religions gave speeches and prayers.
But the majority of the ritual focused on the African-American diaspora and its experiences. “Ring shouts” — a sing-and-dance ritual that comes from slaves in South Carolina and Georgia where the women in traditional garb danced in a ring — were sprinkled throughout the event. The Emancipation Proclamation was also read aloud, a common Juneteenth tradition.
On a tree stump near the ceremony, a young male continuously hammered away against shackles — until he broke them into pieces.
“It represents the chains that continue to plague African-Americans,” said Ravernell, citing mass incarceration of black males outlined in the book “The New Jim Crow” as an example. “We are symbolically breaking chains that are not visible but that we do have.”
The ritual — which started as a private ceremony by Ravernell in 2003 but became a formal public event in 2008 — has a new theme every year. This year’s ceremony, titled “Honoring Our Martyrs of Suffrage,” commemorated the struggle African-Americans faced in trying to exercise their right to vote after the passage of the 15th Amendment in 1865.
In an altar in the center of the ceremony, flowers were set among photos of civil rights workers who were killed by the Ku Klux Klan in the South during the 1960s. The attendees also recognized and honored the 150 African-Americans who were killed by white Southerners in Colfax, Louisiana, in 1873 after the pro-Reconstruction Republicans won the governor’s race the year prior.