No News is Good News, Berkeley’s Juneteenth Festival is Doing Alright
Organizers of the Berkeley Juneteenth Festival have been speaking at recent City Council Meetings expressing their concern that the decades old street festival celebrating African American freedom was going to be canceled two years running.
“We seem to be having conditions imposed upon us that other festivals do not have to meet,” Sam Dyke, Berkeley Juneteenth co-president told Council at the last meeting on May 5th.
“Every time we meet [with the city], we get a guideline, we meet those guidelines, then we get new guidelines…We jump through hoops and then we get a higher hoop.”
Berkeley Juneteenth was canceled at the last minute in 2008 for reasons that were never entirely clear.
