TAMPA, Fla. \u2014\u00a0A 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 \u2014 decades before it became the official flag.<\/p>\n
Ben Haith, the flag\u2019s creator, explained its meaning. \u201cThe star represents all 50 states that we live in,” he said.<\/p>\n
He said the colors are no coincidence.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe red, white, blue, our ancestors contributed,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
He explained how the design was made to matter.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was intentional. The star is intentional; the star represents more than one thing,\u201d Haith said. \u201cIt represents the lone star of Texas. It represents all 50 states in our country.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI started working on it in the 1990s \u2014 1995 right on up to ’97 and started raising the flag at a place in Boston called Roxbury,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
He said that an artist brought his vision to life and that a phone call decades later changed his life. \u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI never thought I\u2019d 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,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a miracle moment he shares every chance he gets.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cSometimes 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?”\u00a0said Tampa Bay Juneteenth Coalition President Philetha Tucker-Johnson. “So to me, it\u2019s really significant that Mr. Ben Haith came down,\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Tucker-Johnson said inviting Haith to celebrate with the city is a lesson for us all.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat I\u2019ve 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,\u201d Tucker-Johnson said.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s the kind of message they\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"TAMPA, Fla. \u2014\u00a0A Bay area group wanted to highlight the significance of the Juneteenth flag, and what better…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":312889,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[274,770,276,2565,115,4368,135,137,136,278],"class_list":["post-312888","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tampa","tag-app-top-stories","tag-community-news","tag-hillsborough-county","tag-juneteenth","tag-news","tag-saundra-weathers","tag-tampa","tag-tampa-headlines","tag-tampa-news","tag-top-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312888","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=312888"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312888\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/312889"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=312888"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=312888"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=312888"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}