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It's a living heritage
Child, the Golden
Girls - and we're not talking about Bea Arthur or Rue McClanahan. We're talking about
the Golden Girls Ltd. - Dorothy "Still Lookin' Good" Hudson,
65; Arlene Howelton, 64; Joyce Davis, 64, and the baby of the group, 59-year-old
Betty Jones. There they were, a
social club of four of Minneapolis' finest retirees, waving to the crowd
in the Juneteenth Parade, sporting gold T-shirts, gold baseball caps and
smiles bright enough to light up an otherwise overcast, if balmy, day.
A perfect day to celebrate the June day in 1865 when Texas slaves found
out President Abraham Lincoln had freed them - 2 1/2 years earlier. "Hey Golden Girl,
now you know you my baby," yelled one admiring young man standing
along the parade route on Glenwood Av. in north Minneapolis. And you'll never guess
who was at the end of the route, smack in the middle of a Theodore Wirth
Park filled with vendors, music and thousands of festivalgoers. None other
than Stagecoach Mary, standing right there smoking a cigar in her calico
dress and wool cap. Oh, you don't know
who Stagecoach was? Only the first black woman to run a stagecoach through
the West in the 1800s. Escaped slavery and settled in Montana, she did.
Ran that stagecoach until she was 70. Yep, there she was. Actually, it was Denise
Hawkins, a member of the American Variety Theater Company of Minneapolis,
portraying Stagecoach Mary. Matter of fact, the players from that company
were walking around the park dressed like all sorts of famous black people,
from Nelson Mandela to Josephine Baker to Madame C.J. Walker, the first
black millionaire. They told anybody
who would listen who they were portraying and why their character is important
to black history. "Twenty-three
bucks. You can't beat it," she said to one inquiring soul. A few feet away from
her, Hennepin County Judge LaJune Lange and her two children pondered
whether to buy some wooden carvings from Kenya or whether to walk on down
past a few T-shirt and incense vendors to another booth with more of the
same. There was just so
much to choose from: black rag dolls, cowrie shell bracelets, books, Afrocentric
posters. Voices from the Living Word Church choir rang out at one end
of the park, and at the other, rhythms of rapper Too Short blared from
a car trunk. And the food. Oh,
the food. Ribs, catfish, roasted corn, snow cones, homemade lemonade.
If you weren't sure where to go or what to do, 6-year-old Juneteenth volunteer
Jason Morris was happy to give you a program of events, even if he had
to tap your leg several times to get your attention. "That's what
they're here for, to help you," he told one attendee. Coursing through the
crowd were the brothers from the Minneapolis mosque of Nation of Islam.
Bow-tied, suited-up faces full of purpose, they would give you a copy
of the Nation's newspaper, the Final Call, for just, "one dollar,
my sister, one dollar, my brother." And speaking of the Nation, local
minister James Muhammed was there too, shaking hands, rapping with this
person and that. A couple hours earlier,
longtime north Minneapolis resident Sylvia Anderson said as she watched
the parade from her daughter's front yard that she wasn't going to the
park because she'd heard rumors of potential violence. But she was torn,
saying, "I want to go, but I've got a 10-year-old son to think about,
and I don't want anything to happen to him." So he had to stay at
home. Gaiters and Frizell
said they were doing their best to make sure nothing happened on their
watch. "This should be incident-free," Gaiters said. But wouldn't you know
it, no sooner had he said that when trouble walked right up to them. Little
Jocelyn had lost her mommy and couldn't find her. |