Honoring Juneteenth: a photo series featuring Black leaders in Santa Cruz County

Santa Cruz has one of the state’s longest-running Juneteenth celebrations, with events across the county spanning over two weekends. This year marked the 35th anniversary.

Juneteenth is connected to the historic moment in U.S. history when former President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, freeing all enslaved people.

The name comes from the day enslaved people in Texas finally discovered they were free on June 19, 1865, when news finally reached them two years later.

The 35th annual event in Santa Cruz was held at the London Nelson Community Center, with dozens of people wearing vivid African-inspired prints and colors representing the Pan-African flag.

All photos were taken by Amaya Edwards, photo & social media journalist and a fellow with CatchLight Local.

Santa Cruz Local interviewed eight Black community members in honor of Juneteenth. These individuals are leaders and pillars of the community, working each day to make Santa Cruz a more welcoming space for Black people and ensuring their voices are heard.

Reporter Amaya Edwards spent one month capturing this story as part of an enterprise project in collaboration with her fellowship at CatchLight Local. Amaya is a mixed-race Black woman. She shares with readers why she wanted to pursue this story, and why it was especially personal to her.

“When I first moved to Santa Cruz to start this job last summer, I had already prepared to be one of the only Black people; In the office, on the street, anywhere. And this has often been true. Traveling around the county to cover different reporting assignments, I get excited when I see another person who looks like me. A wave of relief washes over me. Moving from Oakland to Santa Cruz was truly a culture shock, and sometimes I found myself driving home to the east bay each weekend.

That’s a big part of why I decided to pursue this portrait project. Juneteenth is a celebration but it’s also a time of deep reflection for the Black community. Highlighting the history of Juneteenth helps educate and connect the broader Santa Cruz community who might not know the ties Black people have to this area.” — Amaya Edwards

Ana Elizabeth and David Claytor pose for a portrait at the Tannery Arts Center on June 3.

The siblings moved to Santa Cruz from Rochester, New York about 45 years ago. Together, the siblings have been co-producing the annual Santa Cruz Juneteenth celebration for 28 years. Claytor, owner of SURETHING Productions, and Elizabeth, Senior Executive, took over the Juneteenth event when their predecessor Raymond Evans retired.

Santa Cruz is home to one of the longest running Juneteenth celebrations in California, with this year marking the 35th annual event. One thing that inspires the sibling pair to keep producing the event is the hope that they will be able to pass down the responsibility to the next generation. This year, teen volunteers as young as 12 shadowed Elizabeth and Claytor as they led the event on Saturday, June 13.

“Juneteenth in Santa Cruz has just been such a wonderful way for our community to come together and see each other and celebrate Black joy and remind ourselves of how resilient we are. It’s a way to honor the legacy of Black Americans and formerly enslaved people, and our ancestors. It’s just a moment where we can really just be together in a pretty safe space, and it’s like a big family reunion to see each other every year and see how the kids have grown,” Elizabeth said.

Reggie Stephens poses for a portrait at the London Nelson Community Center on June 9. When Stephens moved from Shreveport, Louisiana to Santa Cruz in 1990, the London Nelson Community Center was one of the first places his uncle brought him.

Esabella Bonner, founder and executive director of Black Surf Santa Cruz, poses for a portrait on the Santa Cruz Wharf on June 9. She is the founder of Black Surf Santa Cruz: an organization empowering the Black community to reclaim their space in the ocean.

Reggie Stephens, a former NFL player, started the Reggie Stephens Foundation to give back to the local Black community in the same way local Black leaders helped him.

“I’ve been doing the work for a long time, and I just want people to know what the foundation means: sports, art, education, culture, seek, believe, achieve, you seek it, you believe it. I’ll help you achieve it,” Stephens said.

Stephens is dedicated to helping student athletes get to college. He’s built a partnership with Morgan State University. The Foundation currently has sent 13 students to study at Morgan State. Stephens chooses to celebrate Juneteenth out of respect to his ancestors. In a city where Black people make up just 1.5% of the population, having Black spaces is important, he said.

“The obvious reason we celebrate is for the end of slavery, but for Santa Cruz it’s also one of those things where the community comes together during this time. If you typically came through Santa Cruz, you wouldn’t see that many Black folks on a daily basis. Now, all of a sudden you come to London Nelson, then you’re going to see a bunch of Black people that you haven’t seen in a while.

It just represents community, it represents togetherness, it represents what we can achieve, especially doing it here at London Nelson, and what he means to Santa Cruz County. Juneteenth, having it here, it just creates this bond of a spot that we’re able to go to and be able to be seen as a people. So it means a lot to me, Juneteenth, and it’s something that we’ve got to continuously, for whatever the reason, fight for. We’re just going to keep taking steps moving forward,” Stephens said.

Santa Cruz was a culture shock for Esabella Bonner when she moved here from the Bay Area in 2005. Bonner is passionate about building community and curating intentional experiences. For her this looks like gathering in outdoor spaces for “Black people to chill out together and just be.”

This is part of the reason why she started her organization, Black Surf Santa Cruz. After organizing her first protest in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, she continued organizing in the community to create spaces for Black and brown people. This came in the form of paddle-outs and more protests. It is because of slavery and racism that Black people’s relationship to water can be so complicated and painful, she said.

On Juneteenth weekend, Black Surf Santa Cruz hosts an annual liberation paddle out.

“I prefer the term commemorating Juneteenth versus celebrating Juneteenth, just because the history is very real and honest, and it’s important to acknowledge and honor that painful truth, so that we can come together and celebrate. We have to, we have to earn the celebration,” Bonner said.

“We come together and we have an annual liberation paddle out. So, a paddle out is a traditional Hawaiian ceremony in the water where people gather on their boards, form a circle, and honor the lives of those who have been lost or who have transitioned, and so every year we run that back, and we provide free surfboards and free wetsuits for folks who maybe want to access the ocean for the first time, or just have an opportunity to be held by the water and connect with our ancestors in that way,” Bonner said.

Kelvin Nivens poses for a portrait at Abbott Square on June 11. Nivens drove from North Carolina to California in 1992 and within a week of living in Santa Cruz, he found two jobs and a place to live.

Cheryl Williams, co-founder of Santa Cruz Black poses for a portrait at the University of California Santa Cruz Arboretum on June 14. Santa Cruz Black is a local grassroots organization born from a time Williams’ refers to as the “Black Spring.”

Most people know of Kelvin Niven’s work in the health and fitness industries. For almost 12 years, Nivens was the owner, sole proprietor and operator of a local CrossFit gym. This work led him to creating his non-profit, Project Daraja, which aims to make health and wellness more accessible for underserved, marginalized individuals, and also the broader public in Santa Cruz County. Project Daraja focuses not just on physical wellness but inner strength and inner peace, helping to put people in touch with their own humanity.

Because of his work, Nivens knows the power of community, and how powerful events like Juneteenth are – he said it’s often one of the only times Black residents in Santa Cruz county come together.

“It’s very interesting, because it’s not a holiday that I grew up celebrating, it is one of those holidays that I’ve learned about after the kind of established routine of celebrating Thanksgiving, Christmas, Memorial Day. These real traditional holidays where there’s all these practices and traditions that are celebrated around them. So for some of us the history of this holiday and what that teaches us about the lasting effects of chattel slavery and how that affected people even after “they were free” is like a perfect example of on paper we’re free but what does that really mean?

It’s a significant part of our American U.S. history, particularly for Black Americans, African American descendants, it’s particularly important, and the word commemorate means to remember together. It might not have been something that you grew up doing, but we got together and we decided that we’re going to barbecue, we’re going to dance, we’re going to sing, we’re going to celebrate, and we’re going to commemorate this day in our own way and make this something special. It’s a chance for people that don’t have a whole lot of things that centralize us and there’s a power when you remember together as a people,” Nivens said.

The UCSC Arboretum is one of Williams’ favorite places because she studied biology with an emphasis on botany at Boston University before moving to Santa Cruz in 1979. When Williams thinks of Juneteenth, she is reminded that the fight for Black freedom and liberation is continuous. After watching the video of George Floyd’s murder, Williams remembers being numb. It was then that she and other women from a group chat decided they needed to act and they organized a protest.

“We all saw the murder of someone, whether you saw it over the weekend, whether you saw it when you got into work, whatever, whatever time it was weighing heavy on people’s minds. And that is the beginning. And then there were meetings, community meetings, and by the end of 2020 there was a group established, we had a name and a steering committee, and from that steering committee we launched Santa Cruz Black,” Williams said.

A quote by Fanny Lou Hamer, who was an influential leader of the Civil Rights movement, has stuck with Williams over her life:

“I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.”

Williams said that famous quote is illustrative of how she and many Black people feel regarding racial injustice still occurring in the present day, and said these feelings didn’t disappear after enslaved peoples were freed or when the Civil Rights movement ended.

“The only thing that I think about is how we can maintain a level of joy, and in the midst of having nothing or struggling for something, we can still maintain, we can see the rainbow, we can see the other side of what we want,” Williams said.

Chelsea Woody poses for a portrait at Rockview Drive County Park on June 4. Woody, a registered nurse and surfer, has been living in Santa Cruz for a decade. She is also the founder of Textured Waves, an organization dedicated to Brown and Black women in surfing.

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Santa Cruz County Supervisor Justin Cummings poses for a portrait in the supervisors meeting chamber on June 12. Growing up in the Southside of Chicago, Cummings found what he was looking for when he finally moved to Santa Cruz for a UCSC graduate program in 2007.

“I wish this community recognized that Textured Waves did start here, and we are (also) located inHawaii and in Southern California. We’ve been around for a while trying to promote diversity in surfing, and that Black and Brown women have a place in the lineup, and to help people understand the journey of what it takes to get to the lineup for a Black woman.

It’s very complex, and our history with the ocean has been really taken away from us. It’s been hidden, much like Juneteenth. A lot of our history needs to be reclaimed, and we need to speak about it, because if we don’t speak about it, it will get lost, and future generations won’t know, because the narrative is controlled by whoever controls the media.

So that’s why we keep showing up, that’s why we’re loud, that’s why we keep speaking about our place in outdoor spaces and sharing our history. Because we want the next generation to know that we have been here and we’ve always had a space and a place, we are ocean people as well,” said Chelsea Woody, waterwoman and founder of Textured Waves.

Santa Cruz County Supervisor Justin Cummings immediately fell in love with the area – the surfing, temperate weather and counterculture were all inviting to him. He went on to help start a nonprofit program focused on increasing diversity and conservation through providing summer outdoor learning experiences. Over time, he also became frustrated with the affordable housing issues and started going to meetings focused on rent control, which eventually led to him getting involved as a public official. Cummings’ work propelled him into local government, making him the first African-American man to be elected Vice Mayor, Mayor and Supervisor in Santa Cruz history.

After working on a ballot measure in 2018, people started asking him if he’d be willing to run for public office.

“So I decided to run for office, and in 2018 I was the highest vote getter in that election, and for the first time in history, myself and Drew Glover became the first two African American men ever to serve on the Santa Cruz City Council,” Cummings said.

“Nowadays it’s easy to get information, but back then there’d been a war over slavery that had been won and to think about how long it took for everybody to get that message, that slavery is over. There were still people enslaved, and the things that happened between that timeline of slavery ending and technically being free. A lot probably kept happening to a lot of people, so for me, especially being in government, it just really highlights how important it is to have good communication and to make sure that the message is getting out, so people understand what their rights are,” Cummings said.

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