LYNN — The Frederick Douglass community reading has been rescheduled for July 25 at Lynn’s First Church of Nazarene, where it will include the church’s annual backpack giveaway and cookout.
The reading was first scheduled for July 3, the day before Independence Day, but the severe heat advisory and outdoor location at Frederick Douglass Memorial Park led to its cancellation, with no new date known at the time.
The secretary and founder of the Lynn Frederick Douglass reading events, Wendy Joseph, shared that having the event line up with the First Church of Nazarene’s annual get-together was divine intervention.
“We decided to ask Pastor Gina if they would be able to host our Juneteenth Frederick Douglass reading there,” Joseph said.
She shared that the legacy of the Juneteenth holiday itself is reflected in the collaboration with the cookout and backpack giveaway, because it is a community celebration at a church, which is historically significant to Douglass’s story.
“It makes perfect sense since that’s where a lot of people actually heard for the first time that they were free… and what a fabulous combination of doing it at a Black church,” Joseph said.
Joseph said that the North Shore Juneteenth Association has always centered on the theme of committed community members seeking to make a difference in the City of Lynn.
Fifteen years ago, Joseph was the first person to bring the Frederick Douglass event to Lynn, which was originally held at High Rock Tower Park. She created it soon after Mass Humanities’ first reading in July of 2009.
“We had the history there of the Hutchinson Family Singers who owned High Rock Park, and had their compound of houses there,” Joseph said. “Frederick Douglass knew the Hutchinsons when he was in Lynn and wrote his first autobiography.”
The autobiography Joseph referred to was “Narrative Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave,” published in 1845, in which he shared his life experiences.
“He had to basically flee after that autobiography caught fire because everyone was reading it and he had named names, which was the first time that one of these slave narratives had named the actual names of the enslavers,” Joseph added.
When Douglass fled to England and Ireland, many members of the Hutchinson family joined him on the boat, as well as at his funeral; the last Hutchinson singer, John Hutchinson, sang.
The historical connections run deep between Douglass and the City of Lynn, and Joseph believes that the community-centered nature of the event on July 25 will keep the history even more alive.
“This is the community celebrating,” Joseph said.
