Juneteenth Celebration at MSUM gets cut short due to weather

MOORHEAD, Minn. (KVRR) — After months of planning, organizers for the 5th Annual Juneteenth Celebration transformed the campus mall at Minnesota State Moorhead. But celebrations had to be cut shorter than expected.

“We saw some weather and some cells developing west of town, and some rain, and lightning, thunderstorms came into town, and obviously we had to shut the event down because with the lightning and thunderstorms we just had to take into consideration the safety of our guests. Which was obviously most important to us,” said Ryan Nelson, Executive Director of Public Safety and Compliance.

Organizers said hundreds of people made it out to the event in the three hours the event was running. And two vendors who were still on the campus packing away did not want to be on camera, but said it was unfortunate it had to end early.

“This is a heavy lift to bring to campus and to any place, really. So, there’s a lot of hours that go into making something like this happen for the community. So, we just appreciate all those relationships we have with the local organizations to make something like this happen,” said Nelson.

One of the organizers, Troy Lee, said although the storm put a pin to their event, they were still able to appreciate the federal holiday.

“We just thought about you know, we’re just going to push this event as far as we could until we heard the thunderstorms and the lightning. However, being able to sit back and slow down and take a look at what we’ve been able to accomplish here in three months, or in two weeks, or even in three hours today has been a positive outcome,” said Lee.

Plans for the future are to be determined, but Lee said they are hoping to plan a full-day celebration and double their numbers.

“It’s not my Juneteenth, it’s not MSUM Juneteenth, it’s for everyone to celebrate. So I just want the branches to help structure this together,” said Lee.

MSUM’s Juneteenth Celebration was the first one held on campus since the City of Fargo cut the event from its calendar.