African American Festival returns to Kingston on Aug. 28
Harambee's African American Festival Featured @ The Daily Freeman
Harambe Executive Director and Founder Tyrone Wilson stands in the middle of East Strand in Kingston’s Rondout, the site of the upcoming African-American Festival on August 28, 2022.. Photo taken August 17, 2022. (Tania Barricklo/Daily Freeman)
By BRIAN HUBERT | bhubert@freemanonline.com | Daily Freeman
PUBLISHED: August 20, 2022 at 1:24 p.m. | UPDATED: August 20, 2022 at 1:34 p.m.
KINGSTON, N.Y. — Harambee’s African American Festival, celebrating community and culture, takes place Sunday, Aug. 28, in the Rondout area.
The festivities kick off with a special parade that will step off from Andrew Street by Kingston High School at 11 a.m. It then proceeds down Broadway to the festival on the Rondout Waterfront.
“We’re encouraging everyone to participate, businesses and organizations,” Harambee Executive Director Tyrone Wilson said. “We’re going to give people great entertainment. Everyone is welcome.”
The festival returns for its second year. It first took place in 2019. It was called off the last two years due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Wilson said he hopes to build on the inaugural festival, which drew more than 1,000 people.
This year’s theme is Motown and there will be several groups, headlined by Shadows of the Sixties and Base Camp, performing classic Motown hits, according to Wilson, who added that several other local groups will be performing.
The festivities will be hosted by former Harambee member Ubaka Hill. “We brought her back,” he said.
A children’s village will offer all sorts of activities in the enclosed area at the Hudson River Maritime Museum, where the tugboat Mathilda sits on land. The festival will also have a section dedicated to elderly people, Wilson said.
“We got a tent where people can get out of the sun, helping them to stay cool,” he said.
There will also be a large selection of vendors including food vendors, Wilson added.
Wilson grew up in Harlem and frequented the biggest African American festival in the country, which was held there. Then, 14 years after moving to Kingston in 2004 and discovering the area’s extensive African American history, he started to ponder hosting a similar festival here.
“I started to talk to people who were born and raised here,” he said. Wilson also said when he asked around if there ever was such a celebration in the city, he started to hear the same story again and again.
“They didn’t feel they could do it,” Wilson said. “They felt it would get blocked.”
That didn’t stop him, he added.
“I’m going to do this,” Wilson said, and he went to Kingston City Hall with a mindset of when they were going to do a festival, as opposed to a negotiating mindset.
“I’m a proud person of color and there are so many people like me,” he said as he stood in a room at Harambee’s headquarters at 157 Pine St. “I’m a Black man in America, and America is not kind to us,” Wilson said.
Wilson said he hopes the hard work put into the African American Festival and Harambee’s other events such as the Juneteenth Celebration and Black History Month Kingston allow people to just relax and have fun.
“For one day you don’t have to carry a burden,” he said. “You can enjoy the entertainment and be reflective.”
Wilson admitted during each event he always finds a quiet corner away from the excitement and energy to digest everything and look back upon his life that started in a “rough neighborhood” in Harlem. He said he grew up living in constant fear of death or jail under systemic structures that made those outcomes occur far too frequently for youngsters.
Wilson said he found his calling in serving his community and bringing people together when he got selected to be part of Americorps. He traveled far from his home to Denver, Colo., a Cambodian camp in Dallas, serving on a special unit that responded to a bombing at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, responding to a devastating hurricane in Puerto Rico and serving as a firefighter.
Now, he sees leading Harambee as his calling.
“God took me in and covered me and told me to bring people together,” Wilson said.
