On this Juneteenth, black leaders in Western Pa. feel tangible change stirring

In the days leading up to Juneteenth — amid the protests and unrest, the uncertainty and the mourning of another black man dead at the hands of police — Tim Stevens felt something.

A shift. A change. Some hope.

Nearly four weeks after the world watched a Minneapolis police officer kneel on George Floyd’s neck until his breath stopped coming and after nearly four weeks of protests that spread from Minnesota to the world at large — things feel different, Stevens said.

The chairman and chief executive of the Black Political Empowerment Program, Stevens has become a staple and a leader in the fight for racial justice and equality in Pittsburgh. At 75, he has been fighting for years.

“I’ve been doing this for decades,” he said. “The fact that it’s only been three weeks — a lot has happened. It almost seems like it’s been months.”

“A lot has happened,” he repeated.

And it has — from mayors’ offices to governors’ desks and even by the power of the president, things are happening.

Statues of Confederate leaders have been dismantled, and the White House has reopened the conversation about renaming military bases named for Confederate generals.

President Trump on Tuesday signed an executive order aimed at police reform, one of the rallying points of protests and demands for change.

In Pennsylvania, two reform bills passed through the House Judiciary Committee unanimously this week and, at a local level, Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto announced the creation of a task force on police reform.

“I do believe that these few weeks have shifted America. I mean that,” Stevens said. “It’s like a universal moment that has touched the country.”

Juneteenth, at its core, is a celebration of the end of slavery in the United States on June 19, 1865. It commemorates Union Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger landing in Galveston, Texas, with word that the Civil War had ended and the Emancipation Proclamation freed the enslaved men, women and children.

Black people were not free when the country as a whole declared its independence on July 4, 1776, said William Marshall, organizer of the Western Pennsylvania Juneteenth Celebration since 2013.

“Juneteenth,” Marshall said, “is our Independence Day in America.”

Much of the planned weekend celebrations and events around the region have been postponed amid covid-19 concerns, and the largest events — the Gospel Explosion music lineup, Pittsburgh’s 150th Juneteenth parade, the vendors and speakers that normally line Point State Park — have been moved to the last weekend of August.

“It’s important to us, particularly in these times of strife and protest and confusion, to highlight our existence and, really, the basis of our state here in America,” Marshall said. “We’re not immigrants. We weren’t brought here willingly.”

He, too, said that the unrest — the demands for change — feel different this time.

Like Stevens, Marshall believes the way in which society had to watch Floyd die has pushed the collective ire further than it’s gone before.

“We watched them taking life out of him. He breathed his last breath, and we could see it,” he said. “It makes me reflect back on lynchings and other tortures that we know black people experienced throughout this country. It’s beyond the civil rights movement this time.”

Stevens and Marshall have been fighting the fight for longer than Camille Redman has been alive, but at 25, she has become one of many young faces of a movement that has never stopped.

After helping to organize two protests that marched hundreds strong through Dormont and Mt. Lebanon, she was asked to join Peduto’s police reform task force. When she was approached by the mayor’s office, she said, she was immediately intrigued.

“I think I bring a balance and a voice to the table that I think may be needed and people aren’t used to,” she said. “I’m all for reform and change for people of color, not only in the local community but the system and state level. In order to do that, I feel like we have to get our feet into the political side.”

She will miss Juneteenth in her home city — she is on vacation visiting family. Beyond the obvious meaning of the day, she said, it holds a special meaning because her sister is the one who taught her about her black history.

“(She is) the one who sat me down and taught me our real history, and she’s also been cheering me on nonstop,” Redman said.

“That’s our freedom day,” she continued. “Today, it means everything, with the things we are out here fighting for and demanding for our people.”

That fight is built on the fight that led to Juneteenth.

“We are fighting to be free from all racial shackles, not just what people deemed was enough for us. We want to be equal. We want to be actually free.”

Not everyone has been touched by the movement, Stevens conceded: “That’s never going to happen.” But he pointed to the increasing number of predominantly white Black Lives Matter marches as an indication that maybe there has been an awakening.

He believes that the dueling horrors of the coronavirus pandemic and Floyd’s killing intersected in a way that made people — made white people — watch. The virus, shown to disproportionately affect minorities, has forced many to stay in their homes. It made it hard to avoid the footage of Floyd’s death, Stevens said. It made them watch.

The job now, he said, is to squeeze everything that advocates can from the attention and put it toward permanent reform.

“We cannot wait for another death,” Stevens said. “I never want to hear those words again, from anybody: ‘I can’t breathe.’ ”