Linking past and present, ‘Kumbayah The Juneteenth Story’ play to tour around the state
The play “Kumbayah The Juneteenth Story” is going on tour across Minnesota this month — starting this week in the Twin Cities — to illustrate the history and meaning behind the newest federal holiday.
Juneteenth, observed every June 19 to celebrate Black culture and commemorate the end of slavery in the U.S., became a federal holiday in 2021 and a state one this February.
The tour kicks off this Friday, June 16, where “Kumbayah The Juneteenth Story” will be staged twice, at 10 a.m. and 7 p.m., at Breck School in Golden Valley. On June 19, the play will be in St. Peter; then, Rochester on June 22 and St. Cloud on June 24. The play was also presented in Minneapolis and Duluth last fall.
“Kumbayah The Juneteenth Story” was created by local writer and activist Rose McGee, and this tour is presented by her organization Sweet Potato Comfort Pie and the Minnesota Humanities Center.
The show opens at a soul food restaurant in North Minneapolis, then transitions to Texas during the Civil War. As the play dramatizes, Confederate generals and slaveholders refused to abide by the Emancipation Proclamation when it was signed in 1863.
For many Black people in the South, including characters in the play, freedom didn’t come until after the war, when Union generals showed up to enforce Lincoln’s order. In Texas, this came in the form of General Order No. 3, issued on June 19, 1865 — the day that’s now commemorated nationwide as Juneteenth.
The “Kumbayah The Juneteenth Story” project began in the 1990s as a youth storytelling initiative McGee helped develop alongside ARTS-Us, an organization founded by longtime Ramsey County commissioner Toni Carter. In response to positive community feedback, McGee soon developed the themes of the stories into a full-length script.
And almost immediately, “Kumbayah” became an important part of Juneteenth celebrations in St. Paul. When the project was first staged as a play, the lead role was portrayed by Carter’s son — then a high schooler, now St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter. For the 1998 show, according to a Pioneer Press article from the time, the cast included Bobby Hickman, the late community activist, and Edna Duncan, who regularly appeared in shows at Penumbra Theatre in the ’80s and ’90s.
Now, McGee leads Sweet Potato Comfort Pie, which she founded in 2014. Her original goal involved baking and distributing sweet potato pies, an important dish in Black foodways, to build community. In recent years, the organization’s work has grown to facilitate conversations and education around racial justice and healing, which sparked a partnership with the Minnesota Humanities Center.
The two organizations first collaborated in 2020, after George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police, on a series of community dialogues called “How Can We Breathe.” And in addition to this summer’s “Kumbayah” tour, McGee and Minnesota Humanities Center CEO Kevin Lindsey are already planning for next year; they hope to stage the play during the school year so teachers can incorporate it into their lessons.
Especially after Floyd’s death, McGee said, public acknowledgments of racial discrimination and Black cultural observances like Juneteenth began to increase. The community has changed in other ways since she first wrote the script, too: Lucille’s Kitchen, the iconic Minneapolis soul food restaurant that still forms part of the play’s setting, closed in 2004.
From her perspective, a growing awareness of the Black experience means that community storytelling and public education projects, like “Kumbayah,” have only become more vital. Recognizing social inequities is certainly important, she said, but if it’s not done substantively, it can actually be counterproductive.
“What are you acknowledging it with?” she said. “If it isn’t something that’s authentic to what we’re trying to bring forth understanding in, then it becomes another time, another holiday, that gets misinterpreted. It gets commercialized in ways…that are not the way it was intended to be.”
This is where the Minnesota Humanities Center steps in.
Whether in literature or philosophy or law or history, the ways we describe the world around us shape how we understand and interact with other people — and ourselves, Lindsey said.
“If you think of it within that frame, stories, and how we tell the stories, are critically important for us as human beings,” he said. “The play does a nice job talking about the past and also setting itself in the present day. The reason why that’s critically important for us is the reality that most of us are guided by the past, however it was conveyed to us, and our present reality in making decisions.”
Tickets for all performances of “Kumbayah The Juneteenth Story” are free, but registration is required online at mnhum.org.
‘Kumbayah The Juneteenth Story’
What: a play exploring the end of slavery in the U.S.
When: performances at 10 a.m. and 7 p.m. on Friday, June 16
Where: Breck School; 123 Ottawa Ave. N., Golden Valley
How: Tickets are free and can be reserved online at mnhum.org
Not in the Twin Cities? Other performances take place June 19 in St. Peter; June 22 in Rochester and June 24 in St. Cloud
