The Northside Festival is a place-based performance of Northside’s abundance. Every year on the last Saturday in April, hundreds of folks gather to celebrate, on a grand scale, the past, present, and future of Northside. Northside, Pine Knolls, and Tin Top have come through Jim Crow, Urban Renewal, attempted mass displacement, inequitable property valuations in 2021, and the COVID-19 pandemic. The Northside Festival continues the value of looking back to look forward—honoring, renewing, and celebrating.
How do we celebrate?
– With almost reckless joy, we devise creative invitations that range from golf cart runs to yard signs.
– We root ourselves in potluck-style food, showing off the abundance for the community to feed 700 of its “family members” with BBQ, hot dogs, slaw, chili, and sweet tea, and crisp lemonade.
– We revive old-school field games and engage in activities like garden planting and children’s crafts.
– We celebrate the talents of local performers, connecting through gospel music, spoken word poetry, choral voices, and more.
– We dance in the streets, symbolically taking back the land that has always been ours through movement, dance, song, laughter, and celebration.
Why do we celebrate?
Through the Northside Festival, we stake a claim and create place. The Northside Festival strategically shifts conventional narratives about the invisibility or non-existence of the Black community in Orange County. The Northside Festival also disrupts current narratives that Northside is “gone.” We are here, and we never left! In fact, we are determining our future and thriving in bending the market toward justice, telling our stories to the next generation, keeping long-term residents in place, and inspiring the next generation of freedom fighters and liberators.
In the process, we build community across lines of difference through celebration, play, and joy.
The Northside Festival emerged from the May Day Festival that took place at Orange County Training School, a public elementary and high school that served Black students in Chapel Hill.