Downtown Peekskill Comes Alive During Annual Juneteenth Parade and Festival

By Journalist Dr. Ms. Jones

PEEKSKILL – On Saturday, June 15th Peekskill celebrated Juneteenth with a parade and festival. Several bands, sororities, fraternities, The Peekskill City School District, after school programs, and organizations marched in the parade from Brown Street to N. Division Street. The festival was located on N. Division and Park Streets downtown.

Restaurant tables lined the street and the community was able to partake in food and drink while listening to the sounds of groups that performed on stage and watching people dance. The streets were also filled with food trucks and vendors who sold meals, drinks, ice cream, cupcakes, jewelry, artwork, toys, clothing, and several shared their services. Former Mayor Andre Rainey emceed the festival.

“The Juneteenth Parade [and Downtown Festival] here in the great city of Peekskill [was] curated by The City of Peekskill Youth Bureau to recognize Freedom Day, recognizing Black pride…[It’s] just one of those great opportunities for our community to come together,” said Rainey who not only emceed the festival, but was in the parade with The National Parent Association, the organization he chairs. “The National Parents Organization [is] an organization that fights to secure equal parenting rights for both parents after separation or divorce. Our goal is to help parents not have to go through the route of family court. When you go to family court in most cases, especially in New York, you get a drawn-out case that can create divide [and] prevent one of the parents from seeing a child on a consistent basis. So, we try to secure the possibility of equal parenting time as long as both parents are fit, of course, loving parents and able to take care of their children.”

Several groups performed during the festival, including Just the Place, The Harvard Scholars, Peekskill S.T.A.R.S., and The United Methodist Church of Peekskill. Steve “Fun Bunch” Dillard taught people urban line dancing. BaseCamp R&B Band brought soulful sounds with throwbacks like “Killing Me Softly with His Song,” “Risin’ to the Top,” “Follow Me,” “Boogie Oogie Oogie,” and “This Is How We Do It” that had the crowd dancing.

“It’s always an honor to be a part of the Peekskill Juneteenth events. This is like the fourth time BaseCamp has actually done it,” said Billy “Badd” BaseCamp who shared that they don’t just sing cover songs. “My wife and I, we record. We’ve done two CDs now. It’s called the R&B Experience, Rosa and Billy The R&B Experience. We actually perform that. Also, the two-man show… BaseCamp has got a lot of things in the future coming up.”

The City of Peekskill Youth Bureau organized Peekskill’s Juneteenth events. Tuesday McDonald is the Executive Director of The City of Peekskill Youth Bureau and the chairperson for Peekskill’s Juneteenth Parade and Festival.

“In 2023, I said, ‘I want to [bring the Juneteenth events] downtown, because normally they used to do [the Juneteenth events] at the riverfront. People kept saying that they wanted it to be intimate. So, I switched it,” said McDonald who stressed the importance of the Juneteenth events. “I want more people to be more in tune with Juneteenth and what it means… The fact that [slaves were] free and then for two years in Galveston, Texas, they didn’t know that they were free.

“And that’s how Juneteenth came about. And I think more people should know that. That’s why it’s so important to us because now everybody was free once they knew…June 19th, 1865.”

Journalist Ms. Jones