After an eight-year hiatus, the African American Festival is returning to Blair County. The festival will be held July 23-24 at the Railroaders Memorial Museum and features craft and food vendors, a Kids’ Corner and musical entertainment.
There also will be a meet and greet with Myles Truitt, who plays Patrick on “Stranger Things.”
The festival’s revival can be credited to Paige Lightner, who was part of the event every year growing up because her dad, Will Lightner, co-founded it and organized it each year.
When she was in her mid-teens, Lightner and her friends got together to perfect Beyonce’s “Get me bodied” dance routine and performed it.
The crowd, she recalled, was dancing and clapping and cheering.
After 20 years, the festival ended in 2014 due to financial difficulties.
In bringing back the event, Lightner, now 30, said she wants people to again experience the camaraderie, family connections and friendships that form, especially for the county’s youth, no matter the color of their skin or their heritage.
Lightner decided to take on the festival in April 2021 after hearing “so many people telling me they wanted (it to return).”
“Why not give it a go?” she thought. Because she didn’t want it “to be something I threw together in a couple of months,” she aimed for this year.
“I didn’t expect it to be this big,” she said. “But I didn’t want it to be small, either.”
The festival will be held over two days, instead of one, and Lightner estimates she has spent more than 500 hours so far on preparations.
She’s nervous, but “not a bad nervous,” she said, “excited nervous.”
There have been some issues, but the organizers have conquered them, she said.
Those issues included the realization that the museum would be remodeling during the festival.
That means there will be less activity inside, and the main doings will occur not in the yard, but the parking lot — and on the 1200 block of Ninth Avenue, which will be closed to traffic.
“I’m just amazed,” said Will Lighner of his daughter’s initiative.
He had to “keep my mouth shut” on some things he observed, particularly the current organizers’ heavy use of social media to publicize the event, Will said.
“I learned to be quiet,” he said. But he’s observing, and trying to help ensure that “loose ends are covered,” he said.
The first festival in 1994 was at Garfield Park, but it arose from a project created the year before in connection with the museum, according to Harriett Gaston, an academic adviser at Penn State Altoona who has been involved with the festival from the beginning.
The museum was showing a film about Pullman porters, many of whom were Black, Gaston said.
Paul Johnson, a local pastor, spoke to Cummins McNitt, then museum curator, about a larger effort to uncover the history of the Black people in the area, including many who came here from the South in the first half of the 20th Century in the Great Migration, Gaston said.
Their effort became the African American Heritage Project, and it featured people who ended up working in the “ash pan gang,” emptying the remains of the burnt coal from the locomotives, for example, Gaston said.
Will Lightner and Henry Hansard proposed the festival to promote the Heritage Project and provide a venue for additional people to recount their stories, Gaston said.
The city promoted it, with Mayor Tom Martin proclaiming Aug. 27, 1994, as African American Heritage Festival Day, she said.
The festival kept going, although on the suggestion of Professor Jerry Zolten, it moved to Penn State Altoona the next year, she said.
Its date coincided with the return of students, to help provide them something to do and to promote diversity.
In 2002, the campus started varying its student-return weekend year-to-year, so for the sake of consistency, festival organizers switched the festival to the fourth weekend of July, to coincide with the annual Sunday School Picnic and Family Reunion, which reunites “present and former Black residents of Blair, Huntingdon, Cambria and Bedford counties (who) come to remember and celebrate their family connections and their history,” Gaston wrote in a proclamation read at a recent City Council meeting.
Will and his wife, Dansie, raised Paige “in the church,” and they stressed inclusiveness, Will said.
That church was Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church at 22nd Street and Fifth Avenue.
While Paige “wants people to know her ethnicity and culture and to respect it,” she also wants people to “get together, blend together,” Will said.
She’s well aware of the current political and racial climate, he said.
“I don’t think anyone will come to do anything to tarnish (the event),” Paige said at a recent planning meeting for the festival.
But to help ensure good attitudes prevail, organizers plan to post signs reading “Kindness Matters,” she said.
“It’s open to everyone,” Paige said at the City Council meeting. “Everyone is invited.”
“I think this (festival) could have a longtime life,” Will said. “I’m just sitting back watching it all unfold.”
The festival begins at noon both days and admission is free.
In addition to the meet and greet with Truitt, who is Paige’s cousin, the festival will feature a variety of music groups on Saturday, including Urban Fusion from State College; Innocent Sin; the Ibeji Drum Ensemble from Pittsburgh; Da One Band from Washington, D.C.; The PennSOULvanians from Altoona and other local talent. The Family Gospel Fest will be featured at 2 p.m. Sunday. The Kids’ Corner will feature hair braiding, giant bubbles, do-it-yourself wildflower bombs and other activities.
More information can be found on the festival’s Facebook page at facebook.com/AAHFestival/.
Mirror Staff Writer William Kibler is at 814-949-7038.
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