‘Black and beautiful’: Napa Valley celebrates Black culture and community, educates at annual event

Patrick Johnson talked about soul music, about the individual moments in each song that create joy and how those can connect people to one another, and how to seize those moments.

Delivering a lively keynote speech Saturday at the seventh annual Napa Valley Black History Month Celebration, Johnson, a Sonoma State University assistant professor of American multicultural studies, said: “Soul music is as soul music does. That becomes the ultimate determinant of whether something is soulful or not. How does it resonate? How does it reverberate in one’s body? And, again, how does it connect us to others?“

Johnson continued: “For all of the theories and methodologies available to us to explore how Black music is woven into the fabric of Black life and about these moments of soul, the best is to simply press play.”

He was among about 150 people who gathered Saturday at Crosswalk Church in Napa to mark Black History Month (this year’s theme is “African Americans and the Arts”), pressing play on loving, celebrating and honoring Black people and Black lives, Black accomplishments and Black culture.

“I’m Black and I’m beautiful,“ Tia Madison, a Napa Valley College communications and theater instructor who emceed the afternoon’s program, proclaimed to appreciative calls from the audience.

”I'm educated. Brilliant. I'm inspired and I'm here to inspire you,“ she added. ”To know me. To see me, damn it! Love me. Because I come bringing all of me to you.“

James “JT” Thompson, a marriage and family therapist who is Black and moved to Napa in 2016 from Oakland, started the event in 2018 because, he said, he didn’t have anyone to celebrate Black History Month with in his new home.

As it’s evolved, said Thompson on Saturday, “There is a celebration component, but it's more education and awareness because the majority of the people in Napa haven't been exposed to Black culture, right? I think that's the ultimate goal. And then I'm hoping that we can build a community to where Napa County is more welcoming for Black folks. So that’s the overall vision.”

In his opening remarks, Thompson noted that when he was marketing the event on social media, some online commenters questioned the need for a Black History Month celebration, asking why a white history month event couldn't be held, and then suggested that the annual event was itself racist. ”I just thank everyone for being here and being a part of this whole journey that Napa desperately needs,” Thompson said to the crowd.

The event has given rise to more than a dozen other Black History Month events that will be held in Napa County in February, notable in a county where 2% of the population of just over 134,000 residents is Black.

“We really never thought this was possible,” said Jennifer Swift, who is Black and Indigenous and who grew up in Napa County in the 1970s and 1980s.

She said in those days, it was “a pretty rough time for people of color here, very different from what it is now.”

Artwork by a mixed-media artist named Noni, from Rocklin and Vallejo, ringed the church hall.

A piece titled “Love, Peace and 44” married together components of four selfies taken by former President Barack Obama and first lady Michele Obama. Another showed a Black woman with purple hair wearing a black, COVID-era face mask printed with the words, “Racism is a virus.”

Before the event started, the crowd grew and people mingled, sipping wine from Black-owned wineries.

In one corner of the room was a table of tiles that children who had attended the event in previous years had painted to reflect themes in Black life.

One tile contained the word, “Freedom,” another, “Black Lives Matter,” and another, “Soul.”

Above them hung a Happy Black History Month sign that featured “action items” including “Say Black when you mean Black (not POC),” “Discuss Black history with non-Black people,” and “Confront anti-Blackness.”

Camren Lipson, a junior at American Canyon High School, sat quietly alone for a while. He had been invited to read a poem he’d written about mass incarceration (according to the Prison Policy Project, Black people make up about 38% of the prison and jail population and only 12% of overall U.S. residents).

"I want people to go away with a different perspective, you know, a different idea. I want them to be informed about the issue if they're not already,“ said Lipson. ”And also just to try to come with some sort of idea of what they can do. And how big of an issue this is, how significant it is.“

Later, when his slot in the afternoon’s program arrived, Lipson would declaim: “Have you ever felt fear / Fear that your freedom is nothing but a souvenir / From a life that you once had, but will never see again/Because it takes nothing but a little color in your skin / for red and blue lights to appear.”

As he waited with his children for the event to begin, Vincent Odebiye, a Napa resident, noted that few Black people were in attendance at Saturday’s event.

“Obviously there are not that many African Americans here, but it's a mixture of everybody. So we're all part of the same kind of community,” he said. “So I think it’s community building, community outreach.”

The program drew to a close and Thompson assembled onstage all who participated in the celebration, as well as those who helped plan it, a mixture of Black and white faces.

“Just look,” he said. “This is what Napa can be like, right?”

You can reach Staff Writer Jeremy Hay at 707-387-2960 or jeremy.hay@pressdemocrat.com. On X (Twitter) @jeremyhay