Black — Darrell Grant's Blog

Birthright

As we celebrate Juneteenth for the second year as a national federal holiday — now on Sunday AND Monday—amidst the block parties, barbecues, festivals, concerts, and civic events, I continue to ponder the meaning and implications of this day. My ambivalence about commemorating the occasion of the constitutional right to freedom for African-Americans being reluctantly accepted by the last holdouts is balanced by what I imagine were the jubilant hopes and dreams embodied by those first celebrations, as our people claimed their birthright as free human beings at long last.

My thoughts on receiving the Governor's Arts Award

I’m honored and grateful to be receiving this award. I never could have imagined when I first arrived here from New York in 1997 – a young jazz pianist, starting my first University teaching job, and looking for a place to build community, – that I would be standing here more than 2 1/2 decades later, so bountifully surrounded by what I hoped to discover.

HomeDarrell GrantOctober 16, 2020Governor's Arts Award, Oregon, Bipoc, Black Lives Matter, Black, Black experience, Jazz

It's About Time

I didn’t know about Juneteenth.

Not as a boy growing up in the late 1960’s in suburban Lakewood, Colorado. Not as a college student at the Eastman School of Music and the University of Miami in the 1980’s. Not as a young jazz musician in New York City in the 1990’s. It wasn’t highlighted on the news, or taught in school. To my knowledge, my parents never mentioned it either. They weren’t much for secular holidays. And rather than reliving the past, we were raised to look to the future.

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