MINNEAPOLIS, Minn. — If June celebrations After last-minute preparations were completed, a relatively new kind of movement was already underway in Golden Valley on Saturday.
For the second year, and with double the crowd, people celebrating Juneteenth ran. Some only half a mile – others a 5k. Regardless, it was a step forward in many ways.
“The mission was just to get people to show up,” said Deanna Perkins, who helped the Loppet Foundation organize the run. “It’s about bringing the community together to celebrate Juneteenth, celebrate freedom, celebrate community and togetherness and be active together.”
It’s fitting, Perkins says, that Saturday’s events started with an emphasis on being active. Before the first race, she and other organizers honored Beverly Propes — a public health nurse whose constant work to keep Black Minnesotans healthy helped
form a generation.
“To me, it’s kind of giving back to the community by elevating someone in the community while he or she is still living here,” Perkins said. “And maybe inspire others to take it up.”
Propes reminisced about the first Juneteenth celebration in Minneapolis in 2007, which had already set out to improve health and well-being.
“We had a huge health tent,” Propes said. “In that tent, we had every health care provider who was trying to reach this community, setting up tables and sharing what they could do to make sure the people in this community were healthy.”
During Saturday’s Juneteenth event, “We are the Noise,” doctors from the University of Minnesota worked to keep that tradition alive.
“Trying to do outreach at events like this is great, as a way to give people an opportunity to meet us,” says Dr. Aarabhi Rajagopal, a Pediatric Hospital Medicine Fellow at the U of M. “It allows people with background in healthcare allows color to see that there are people like them who are in medicine, and that these goals are achievable.”
“We need health and wellness for everything to go well,” Perkins said. “Just to be okay to deal with life, to move on, what we talked about, Juneteenth is about celebrating freedom. How can you celebrate freedom without being healthy?”
Adam Duxter
