MANTEO — The fourth annual Juneteenth celebration held Wednesday outside the Pea Island Cookhouse House Museum connected Outer Banks history and present.
Several event speakers stressed the continuing need to pursue freedom for all.
Beloved professional opera tenor Tshombe Selby, 40, who grew up in Manteo and sang his way to his current place at The Metropolitan Opera in New York, returned to headline the local event, called, “The Sounds of Freedom.”
Over 300 estimated attendees maintained a reverent silence whenever Selby sang during the event.
He opened with the national anthem, then later sang “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” alternately titled, “The Negro National Anthem.” Other songs ranged from traditional spirituals dating back centuries to newer songs like “Stand Up” from the 2019 movie, “Harriet,” about famed abolitionist Harriet Tubman.
Coquetta Brooks, event emcee and secretary of the nonprofit Pea Island Preservation Society, Inc., (PIPSI), which organizes the celebration, spoke to the power of Selby’s singing.
“It should be soothing to your soul,” Brooks said.
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History and present intertwine
PIPSI has organized the annual event since June 2021, when President Joe Biden signed legislation making Juneteenth—a shortening of “June 19”—a federal holiday, and Gov. Roy Cooper also proclaimed June 19 as Juneteenth Day in the state.
June 19, 1865, marked the day 2.5 years after former President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation when federal troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, to secure freedom for the African Americans still enslaved there.
Darrell Collins, PIPSI president and a former Town of Manteo commissioner, spearheaded Dare County’s inaugural Juneteenth celebration, as he “came up with this brilliant idea to have Juneteenth right here in 2021 on the grounds of the cookhouse museum,” Brooks said.
The cookhouse is an original Pea Island Life-Saving Station building that was moved to Manteo from Rodanthe, where the station operated until it was decommissioned in 1947. The U.S Life-Saving Service was the Coast Guard’s predecessor.
PIPSI is dedicated to promoting of the history of Keeper Capt. Richard Etheridge, the other Pea Island Life-Saving crewmembers and the African American history of the island, Brooks said.
Etheridge was born enslaved on Roanoke Island, served in the Union Army and became the country’s first Black keeper, or life-saving station commander, when he was appointed in 1880. For decades, he led an all-Black crew that was renowned for its heroic and successful rescues.
Randy Foster, 72, has been a Dare County resident for about 35 years, and “my wife and I are pretty familiar with the story of the Black life-saving station and everything that they did,” he told The Pilot during event intermission. This was his first time attending the Juneteenth event, and he was drawn to hear what the speakers said and to hear Selby sing.
“He’s a heck of a singer, and he’s worked real hard to become one, I think,” Foster said.
Foster recalled that when his son was playing baseball for Manteo High School, they usually had “canned music” for the national anthem before games. One time, as a then-high school senior, Selby sung it and left the audience in “stunned silence,” he said.
When he moved to Dare County from Virginia, Foster said he noticed, “Black people and white people got along a whole lot better than I was used to.”
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Personal ties
Selby, like many Black residents hailing from Manteo, has ancestors who were part of the Roanoke Island Freedmen’s Colony and the Pea Island Life-Saving Station.
Selby said he grew up singing at Haven Creek Baptist Church, which was the first Black church established on the island during the time of the Freedmen’s Colony and is located close to the museum on whose grounds Wednesday’s event took place.
“If you could cross the creek [Croatan Sound] to Roanoke Island you will find a safe haven,” Darrell Collins said, explaining how the church was named in an audio clip played at the event of a recorded interview for CURRENTtv.
Roanoke Island became the first place of freedom for formerly enslaved African Americans in North Carolina when the Union Army won the Battle of Roanoke Island in 1862—thanks in no small part to local African Americans like Thomas Robinson, according to Mike Zatarga of the National Park Service.
The federal government formally established the Roanoke Island Freedmen’s Colony the following year, as refugees from enslavement came from the mainland—in numbers that some estimates put as high as 4,000 people.
The 2020 U.S. Census listed Manteo’s population as 1,600.
When Union Army troops landed at Hatteras Island to prepare for the invasion of Roanoke Island, they had no local maps. “They didn’t even have any kind of depth charts,” Zatarga said in his remarks at the event. “Robinson and a few other African Americans volunteered and helped the Union Army win the battle.”
Robinson’s story is one of the many local African American stories now told through self-guided exhibits on the Freedom Trail, a 2.5-mile roundtrip walking path on North End of Roanoke Island that the park service opened June 1.
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‘Are we really free?’
Manteo Mayor Pro Tem Betty Selby during her remarks said Juneteenth “means a lot to me personally.”
“But I challenge you today: Are we really free?,” Betty Selby asked. “When we look at the justice system, the economics, the housing, are we Black people really free? When we look at jobs, are we free?”
She continued, “We’re not, but we’re striving to get there. We’re going to do the same fight they did in 1865, 1963 and all that. Continue the fight.”
Manteo Commissioner Michael Basnight also attended and in brief remarks, agreed with Selby about working toward a better future together.
Rev. Dr. Michelle Lewis in her remarks stressed that while enslavement became illegal in the United States, “167 countries worldwide still hold 46 million slaves”—including those in forced marriages and in labor and human trafficking.
“These numbers don’t include the numbers of people affected by the prison industrial complex and mass incarceration,” Lewis added.
Lewis said that members of the Freedmen’s Colony who stayed on the island after the government disbanded the colony “had to petition to be here.”
She emphasized the ongoing need for people to challenge oppressive systems.
“Oppressed people need you to show up when the work is hard and uncomfortable,” Lewis, also a descendant of Pea Island life-savers, said.
Tshombe Selby in closing remarks to the audience recognized John Buford, who accompanied him on the keyboard.
Buford was diagnosed with cancer shortly after being named 2023 Dare County Schools Teacher of the Year last August. He told The Pilot his last public performance was at last year’s Juneteenth, and this event marked his first public performance after returning home from months away for treatment.
“Be like him, and offer your talent and do what you can when you can,” Tshombe Selby told the audience.
