TAMPA, Fla. — A Bay area group wanted to highlight the significance of the Juneteenth flag, and what better way to do that than talk to the man who created it — decades before it became the official flag.

Ben Haith, the flag’s creator, explained its meaning. “The star represents all 50 states that we live in,” he said.

He said the colors are no coincidence.

“The red, white, blue, our ancestors contributed,” he said.

He explained how the design was made to matter.

“It was intentional. The star is intentional; the star represents more than one thing,” Haith said. “It represents the lone star of Texas. It represents all 50 states in our country.”

And the timing for creating the layers and details for the Juneteenth flag was something Haith said he never saw coming back in the early 1990s.

“I started working on it in the 1990s — 1995 right on up to ’97 and started raising the flag at a place in Boston called Roxbury,” he said.

He said that an artist brought his vision to life and that a phone call decades later changed his life.  

“I never thought I’d have Dr. Ronald Myers, who had a national campaign to make Juneteenth a national holiday, would call me in Boston from where he lived in Louisiana and ask to use the flag. I mean, it was all like a miracle,” he said.

It’s a miracle moment he shares every chance he gets.

In a recent visit to a Tampa Juneteenth celebration, he met with a group of students from the Tampa Bay Juneteenth coalition. The students were eager to learn more about how threading the needle to create a flag had the ability to bring so many people together.

“Sometimes we learn about history in our history books, but history is right next to us. And if history is right next to us and we can reach out and touch it, why not?” said Tampa Bay Juneteenth Coalition President Philetha Tucker-Johnson. “So to me, it’s really significant that Mr. Ben Haith came down,” 

Tucker-Johnson said inviting Haith to celebrate with the city is a lesson for us all.

“What I’ve learned also is that when people are actually raising the Juneteenth flag, I noticed that sometimes they raise the Pan-African flag. But what people have to understand the difference is, the Pan-African flag represents our roots, the Juneteenth flag represents our liberation,” Tucker-Johnson said.

That’s the kind of message they’re hoping people get from the presentation of the flag, the acknowledgement of its significance and its raising in the halls of the Tampa City Center with help from the man who created it.