2025 Juneteenth Workshops

Wednesday June 17th

4pm | D ST Neighborhood center

1301 D ST Arcata

Cultural Expression: “Seeds of the Diaspora” Tasting Experience

“Seeds of the Diaspora” is a guided sensory experience connecting African diasporic food traditions with Black history, cultural survival, and community healing. Participants will move through tasting stations featuring five culturally significant herbs, spices, and ingredients: benne, grains of paradise, filé, sarsaparilla, and curry leaf.

Each station will introduce the ingredient’s flavor, cultural roots, culinary uses, and relationship to healing or medicinal traditions. The stations will also honor Black legislators, physicians, farmers, educators, and community builders whose leadership shaped the Reconstruction era. Through food and storytelling, guests will learn how African diasporic communities preserved knowledge, adapted traditions, cultivated nourishment, and created pathways for thriving across generations.

This activation treats the kitchen as more than a place where meals are prepared. It recognizes food as an archive: a living record of migration, memory, resistance, creativity, and care. Participants will be invited to consider how seeds, recipes, plants, and foodways carry history even when written records have been lost or erased.

To extend the experience beyond the event, attendees will receive a “Plant What They Tried to Bury” kit containing heirloom benne seeds. The seed kit symbolizes cultural continuity and reminds participants that the knowledge and traditions carried by Black communities continue to take root, grow, and nourish the future.

Additional Activations include:

6/19/26 - The Epitome Gallery - 6pm - 8:30pm
6/20/26 - Day Festival Halvorsen Park Eureka - 3pm - 7pm

Wednesday June 17th

7pm | The Minor theater | 1001 H ST Arcata

Historical Remembrance: Reconstruction Community Watch Party

Juneteenth marks emancipation, but the story of Black freedom did not end in 1865. This community screening invites participants to explore the Reconstruction era, a transformational period when formerly enslaved Black people helped reshape American democracy despite extraordinary resistance.

Attendees will view the first installment of the documentary series Reconstruction: America After the Civil War. The film highlights the leadership and agency of freed Black communities who founded schools, purchased land, built businesses and institutions, won public office, and organized to protect their families and newly recognized rights.

The program intentionally shifts the historical lens away from narratives centered only on enslavement and suffering. Instead, it uplifts Black capability, political imagination, institution-building, and collective determination. Participants will be encouraged to consider how the achievements and unfinished struggles of Reconstruction continue to shape voting rights, education, racial justice, and community life today.

This gathering is designed for community members of all backgrounds and offers an accessible entry point into a frequently overlooked chapter of American history. Together, we will remember Reconstruction not simply as a period that followed the Civil War, but as a blueprint for Black freedom-building whose seeds remain alive today.