Juneteenth NJ Festival Makes a Comeback With Community Pride and Cash Cobain

© KaiYanna Tsehay Washington / @OFFICIAL_KAIKAI

It was all a dream for three friends from New Jersey who threw one of the biggest Juneteenth celebrations in the nation this past weekend ahead of the holiday.

“It still doesn't feel like it was real,” says co-founder Isaiah Thomas, about 24 hours after Juneteenth NJ took over the PNC Bank Arts Center in Holmdel, NJ. “It was a perfect day. It was perfect,” agrees Stevens “Showcase” Germain.

“I was overwhelmed,” Jola “Flygerian” Babalola says. “Granted we were working a lot, but the moments where we could just sit and see what was actually going on out there, it was unbelievable. I was like, ‘This is actually crazy.’”

On Sunday, June 16, Thomas, Germain, and Babalola organized their fourth iteration of experiential music and cultural festival Juneteenth NJ. Over 7,000 people attended the multigenerational event, which included a Black-owned marketplace dubbed Vendor Village, food trucks and bars, and DJ sets and performances by UNIIQU3, Topaz Jones, house music trailblazer Tony Humphries, DJ Miss Milan, co-founders Showcase and Flygerian, and headliner Cash Cobain.

The stakes were higher than ever for the founding trio after Essex County officials canceled last year's festival three days before it was set to take place at Newark's Branch Brook Park, citing crowd size and safety concerns. The independent festival has bounced between venues and locations in North Jersey for the past five years, jumping hurdle after hurdle to carve out a large celebratory space for young Black people in the tristate.

It's been a long road to Juneteenth NJ 2024, but with a new partnership with Live Nation, the festival has found new footing and funding — and potentially, a forever home. “I feel high on emotions,” says Germain. “It's the most rewarding thing. All three of us were like, ‘Yo, we just need to make it to Sunday.' We were making a lot of sacrifices to assure that this event was a success.”

Juneteenth marks the day in 1865 that the last enslaved people in America were freed in Galveston, Texas. Black Texans have been celebrating Juneteenth, or Jubilee Day, for nearly a century and a half.

After the #BlackLivesMatter movement upsurged during the spring and early summer of 2020 following the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, forcing a national reckoning and recirculation of Black history, more information on the Black American holiday began to spread across the United States. With this knowledge, 2020 was the first year many Black people in America celebrated Juneteenth, including Thomas, Germain, and Babalola.

“Back in 2020… a lot of us were suffering as far as the things that were going on within our community,” says Thomas. “It was very heavy on all of us. We were getting together and coming together by the thousands to fight for those lives. It was very rare to see a lot of us come together to celebrate each other [or] celebrate Juneteenth [in New Jersey]. I remember coming back from a protest and thinking, 'I know two DJs, and Juneteenth is coming up. Let's go to a park and play some music.'”

Juneteenth NJ was a pandemic baby. That first year, with just a tent, two speakers, and a permit for an outdoor social-distanced gathering, the trio arrived at Jersey City's Liberty State Park expecting “maybe a hundred people.” However, their “rinky dink” flyer inspired by a vintage Afro Sheen ad had been re-shared so many times on social media that 5,000 people showed up to the free event. Flygerian and Showcase DJ'd, and Showcase remembers looking up at 4 p.m. and seeing a crowd “360 degrees” around the tent.

“[We were] surrounded by just beautiful Black folks just dancing, enjoying themselves. It was such a liberating feeling,” says Germain. “The basis of Juneteenth [is] freedom. In that pivotal moment in 2020, being in a pandemic, being locked in a house, it was our sense of newfound freedom, being able to be with our friends again. It kind of felt like a big family reunion, and I think that energy catapulted us into where we are now.”

In 2021, President Joe Biden signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act into law, officially making June 19 a federal holiday. While it would seem like a no-brainer for the festival to return, Babalola says social distancing guidelines, event restrictions, and emerging COVID-19 variants proved to be challenges to organizing a safe event.

Within the month of June they got the green light to return to Liberty State Park, this time with funding from Roc Nation's head of lifestyle and Paper Planes co-founder Emory Jones, food and merchandise vendors, and a stage with an LED backwall. The attendance clocked in 10,000 people across 33 states. Now, they also had a national presence.

“It's crazy to see how far people travel to celebrate Juneteenth in Jersey,” says Germain. “There's something special there.”

In the years that followed, Babalola, Germain, and Thomas expanded Juneteenth NJ's programming to be week-long and, eventually, year-round. There are sold-out monthly open mic nights at local venues, block parties in partnership with local businesses, informational live panel events, and a Black-owned market at American Dream mall. Germain says Juneteenth NJ's pillars are community service and access through various mediums.

“We love to party, we love to come together and have a good time, and that's the essence of the Juneteenth NJ Festival,” adds Babalola. “But the education and enlightening one another and pouring into our community is very, very important. At the end of the day, it's really all about educating each other on a holiday that was overlooked in this area. We were like, 'Hey, let's use this as an opportunity to also educate our friends and family about what we have going on and what the holiday is truly about.'”

The festival scaled up in size and production faster than the trio prepared — they had to start a GoFundMe to pay Liberty State Park's cleanup, security, and police bills. Juneteenth NJ grew so quickly that the 2022 edition had to be moved from the park. The trio struggled to find a new site and funding, and consistently faced crowd size restrictions unrelated to the pandemic. The 2022 festival was eventually held in East Rutherford, essentially in the parking lot of American Dream.

“We built a festival in a parking lot… and we were really scared. We didn't know what it was going to be like,” says Germain. “We were telling people to buy tickets for the first time, and we put it out late, too… we had about three weeks to make ends meet.”

While they were able to make the 2022 festival happen, which featured Jersey native artists like Nija and a turnout of over 10,000 attendees, the founders were still creating the event with a steep learning curve in real time. Some 2022 festivalgoers expressed concern on social media over the size of the crowd, the venue's fencing, and security. The trio has since committed to being transparent with their audience and taking all feedback in stride.

“We've learned to give ourselves a lot of grace,” says Babalola. “And as long as we correct and right all of the things that we learn from, we are going to succeed in this space.”

According to the trio, 2023's “devastating” cancellation came after Essex County officials gave them only 10 days notice to pay over $35,000 for police fees. They failed to meet the deadline. Essex County officials told CBS at the time that the founders “didn't do their due diligence” and were rushing to put together an event in a matter of “six weeks.” Thomas believes officials could have been daunted by the amount of Black people who were to attend the event. Nevertheless, it made them question the future of Juneteenth NJ.

“We was down bad after getting canceled,” says Germain. And still, the universe worked in their favor — through networking and mutual contacts, the trio was introduced to the Senior Vice President of events for Live Nation, who was already aware of the magnitude of the festival. By November 2023, the founders had locked in a partnership with the company and a venue: the PNC Bank Arts Center.

“I'm just glad that we're able to bring community together of this magnitude, because that's the foundation of why we've done this. It's rooted in that. It was never rooted in monetary gain,” says Germain. "It's always been rooted in, 'Let's do something great for our people and specifically for Jersey.' I don't think there was any doubt [among us]. If there was any doubt, it was a doubt that somebody else would give us a shot."

With this new “sense of security,” they were able to pull off one of their most successful events yet. Germain's parents attended their first event hosted by their son, and Babalola and Thomas also had “cousins, uncles, aunties" in the audience. There was an electrifying performance of “Fisherrr” from Cash Cobain, a special DJ set honoring New Jersey legends like Whitney Houston, a rousing sing-along of Kendrick Lamar's “Not Like Us,” and a Juneteenth flag waving high. Backed by the support of their community, Juneteenth NJ seems like an unstoppable force. There is nothing else like this in New Jersey.

In the afterglow of the event, their future seems bright. “I think there's a lot of room for growth at that space,” says Babalola of their new venue. “Even with the 7,000 we had, we can double that and still be within the capacity, so I could only imagine what that is going to be like… I know we won a lot of people back, and a lot of people that didn't believe in it this year have an immense amount of FOMO. There's so much space and infrastructure to do a bunch of cool stuff, too. We can have DJs in other areas in the vendor village or in the VIP club, more added entertainment, more activations. Just growing in numbers. I think it's going to be great.”

CBS was on the ground at the festival, and in a video segment from the event, a little Black girl in attendance says to the reporter in earnest: “If we didn't have this, what would we have?” The gravity of a multigenerational legacy is just now starting to weigh on the founders.

“I personally never really thought about [how] there is a younger generation that's probably attending this for the first time,” says Thomas. “Or they [are] celebrating Juneteenth at a really young age, which I didn't necessarily get a chance to do. Now when they get older, they can be like, 'Man, I've been doing this for years. I've been coming here since I was 10.' Being a part of a moment that literally is imprinted into Jersey and Black Jersey culture is incredible.”

Keep scrolling below to see more photos from Juneteenth NJ 2024:

Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue

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