In a region with so much diversity, an event in June will celebrate race amity, or race friendship, by bringing people of many backgrounds together to learn and enjoy that diversity. Advocates for Race Amity, or AFRA in Pinellas County, will host a National Race Amity Day at Clearwater Baha’i Center on Sunday, June 11.
What is Race Amity Day?
Race Amity Day, or RAD, is a nationwide movement of communities celebrating and proclaiming the day to celebrate diversity and learn about each other’s, culture, history, and ethnicity. It is a community building event. It started in Boston about five years ago.
“Since this started in Boston, several states, including Massachusetts, South Carolina and Alabama have gotten their governors to sign resolutions proclaiming the day as an unpaid holiday,” said Alice Nightingale, with AFRA in St. Pete. She said the group is still working to get Gov. Ron DeSantis to sign a similar proclamation, which so far, he has failed to do.
The event takes place each year on the second Sunday in June, segueing with Juneteenth, which takes place June 19 to celebrate an event also known as Freedom Day, Jubilee Day, and Celebration Day. In 1865, the Emancipation Proclamation was read to enslaved African Americans in Texas, giving them the knowledge that they had been freed.
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“We are collaborating with Juneteenth on this event. This started after a film came out about five years ago called An American Story: Race, Amity and the Other Tradition, shown on public television,” Nightingale said. The movie discusses how people of various nationalities and ethnicities started coming together back in the 1800s. Race Amity Day plans to do the same.
The celebration will include music, fun activities for children, refreshments, and several speakers, including a Hispanic speaker, a storyteller, and many sponsors who will set up booths to let people know about their services.
Building a community
Today, all these years after those first gatherings of various peoples, there are still struggles right in this country, Nightingale said. For example, those fighting to get a $1-an-hour raise for migrant farmers are sometimes arrested for their protests. And people of various nationalities are separated in the fields so they cannot collaborate, she said.
“Last year, the event was flooded with people,” more than 100, she said. “We are not sure how many we can draw this year, but it will be held inside. And we will have an activity by Haitian artist Junior Polo. He will create a huge canvas” showing the area’s diversity. Children in attendance can create smaller canvases to take home.
“A lot of the activities revolve around the children because they are the future,” Nightingale said. “There is always an orientation toward children.”
The Baha’i faith believes that all people are members of one human family. The center is not the only sponsor of the event, but the event fits with its teaching.
Learning from the past
Nightingale attended the first RAD in Boston and said she learned a lot. She remembers hearing a story of a young woman who befriended a girl and her father, who was in the Ku Klux Klan. They kept meeting and discussing whether what he was doing was right. His heart softened, Nightingale said, and he ended up leaving the Klan. “She said he changed his mind” about the Klan’s beliefs and about passing that on to his own young children.
RAD encourages people of different faiths, ethnicities, and races to get to know each other. They encourage people to learn about the differences and similarities in their own community.
The event has drawn a large number of sponsors, including:
- League of Women Voters North Pinellas and St. Petersburg
- The Pinellas Community Foundation
- The Homeless Alliance Coalition
- Community Tampa Bay
- The Urban League – St. Petersburg
- NAACP
- Boricuas de Corazon
- RaceWithoutism
- Ferrell Communications, Inc.
To learn more, visit raceamitypine.org. The event is on June 11, from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. The Baha’i Center is located at 2898 Gulf to Bay, Clearwater and is free and open to all.