Sharyn Mitchell, long-time resident of Berea, reflects on the meaning of Juneteenth

Picture a 5-year-old girl at the Winchester train station with her parents.

She is waiting for her ride to Berea, where her great aunt is waiting for her, in a room filled with mops and cleaning supplies – the colored waiting room.

Outside, there are separate water fountains for White and Black. When the train arrives, the young girl walks to the back. The porter, a Black man, takes her under his care.

“And I was not aware,” Sharyn Mitchell, Chair of the Berea Human Rights Commission said. “To me, it was just like, I still will smell the train, I want to go someplace.”

Mitchell grew up in the 50s and 60s during the Civil Rights Movement and the era of segregation and desegregation.

Once, while she and her sister were walking home from school, a policeman offered them a ride.

“The police car drove up in the driveway and scared momma to death,” Mitchell said. “And she said, don’t you all ever, because we could have just not seen you all anymore.”

Elsewhere in Mississippi, Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy, was brutally murdered and mutilated in an act of racism. Mitchell’s mom knew about this, the children did not.

But the history of Berea, though fraught with discrimination, was also unique compared to cities and towns across Kentucky.

“We lived together, so I did not have as much of the, you know, that you see in the cities and growing up in the Deep South,” Mitchell said.

She described it as a checkerboard town, where White and Black families lived together. Kids would play basketball together but go to separate schools.

She attended Middletown Consolidated Rosenwald School, a four-room school with Black-only teachers. She also attended other all-Black schools across Central Kentucky.

“In those schools, we could be anything. We were taught that the word ‘to be’ is an action word and we could be anything we wanted to be,” Mitchell said.

At those schools, their facilities were worse than the White-only schools. For example, during the winter they had a heated potbelly stove to keep them warm while other schools had furnaces. They would only get textbooks after White students had used them for years. And they would play outside on the dirt while White students had gymnasiums.

“We learned to survive and to use what we had, and what we could, to do the best, to be the best,” Mitchell said.

Growing up, Mitchell remembered that at the movie theaters if you were Black, after buying your ticket you had to go outside and come back in through a separate entrance to sit in the balcony. Additionally, some restaurants would not want African Americans to come in and eat.

“But that was not even the whole town then,” Mitchell said. “Now in Richmond and Lexington and whatever, yes, they actually had to boycott and do the marches. But I think there was only two restaurants here in town that I heard would not accept black.”

Berea College was the only integrated school in Kentucky until the Day Law in 1904, deliberately aimed at Berea College, was passed to prevent White and Black students from attending school together. It was overturned in 1954 by the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas.

But relationships, especially among children, defied the rules that law and society tried to impose on people.

“My former mother-in-law, she said her dad grew up with this guy and they would be doing what teenage guys do black and white, they would be smoking cigarettes illegally and probably shooting dice or whatever they did back in the day,” Mitchell said.  

Even Red Foley, the famous country musician from Berea, was taught by Mitchell’s aunt to play the piano. 

These are some of the horrible, unjust, but occasionally complex and hopeful histories that make Juneteenth a celebration of freedom. 

After President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, not all enslaved African Americans in Confederate States were free. Two years later, Union soldiers went into Galveston Bay, Texas and declared that enslaved African Americans were free. That day, June 19, 1865, became known as Juneteenth. It was declared a federal holiday in 2021 commemorating the end of slavery and celebrating freedom. 

“I told people I do not want it to be all about slavery. I want it to be about freedom and that is what it is called. In a lot of places it is called Freedom Day,” Mitchell said.  

The official Juneteenth celebration in Berea on June 15 had music, vendors, and meaningful performances where audiences joined in singing and playing their instruments. 

The Berea Human Rights Commission wanted Juneteenth to be about community. They wanted to honor the traditions and accomplishments of African Americans and invite people to share in that history and realize that freedom has helped everyone. 

“We have a long way to go, but we have come a long way too,” Mitchell said. “Richmond has a Black mayor, Berea has its first female president, so we are getting there.”