Joslyn Stanfield received a phone call from a community member a little over three weeks before the Juneteenth event she was co-organizing. The caller tipped her off that Bend city staffers had discussed backing out on the event because of a Facebook post she made.

“That was very shocking and upsetting,” Stanfield said.

Another group had already pulled out of holding a larger Juneteenth event because they were afraid of racist attacks against Black attendees.

Stanfield and her co-organizer, Kasia Moon, had stepped in to help pull together Central Oregon’s only event celebrating the federal holiday. Now, the city seemingly wanted out because Stanfield offered a rebuke on her personal Facebook page of white people who had previously harmed Central Oregon’s Black residents.

While Stanfield and Moon did eventually receive funding from the city of Bend, the series of events that delayed the check underscored for Stanfield how far the city has to go to understand what it means to be Black in Central Oregon. It has also left the Juneteenth organizers wondering whether the city can deliver on commitments to a more inclusive Bend.

Events and city funding

Bend gives money to events that serve groups of people it cannot effectively reach. As city staffer Meghan Goss put it, Bend sponsors events that are already engaging people on issues that align with city goals.

The city dedicated just over $225,000 to its sponsorship program in its current budget cycle, according to Goss.

Mainstay events under the program include the Fourth of July parade, Veterans Day parade, Welcoming Week, Bend Pride in the summer and Juneteenth.

These events fit with Bend’s broad promotion of itself as an inclusive place where all people are welcome. City staff show up to cultural events and hand out branded stickers and pins to match the cultural event. In the past, city council has displayed the progressive pride flag in its chambers and made proclamations in celebration of Black, Asian, Hawaiian and Pacific Islander residents, LGBTQ+ identities and other communities. But sponsorships for public events can also draw the city into navigating the personal politics of a place that has long struggled to be inclusive, as evidenced by a steady series of publicized attacks against Black people.

It’s rare for the city to pull funding for events, but it has happened before. In 2024, Bend rescinded sponsorship funding for a Christmas parade because organizers wouldn’t allow the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Central Oregon to fly flags that supported the Black and LGBTQIA+ communities as part of their flag corps in the parade.

Threats cancel original event

At its most distilled, Juneteenth celebrates Black liberation from enslavement by white people in the United States of America, but for Stanfield, the event is more. It’s a celebration of Black American culture and a space where people can be joyful, relax and bask in Blackness.

This year, Stanfield was excited to lean into more celebration and less education, with a focus on supporting Black people with small market commerce.

The Fathers Group, a Central Oregon nonprofit that supports Black fathers and families, has organized Juneteenth from 2021 to 2024. Before that, Stanfield and other Black women organized the first Juneteenth event in Bend’s Drake Park in 2020. That was also when they began demonstrating for racial justice.

She also helped organize a protest in her former hometown of Prineville, a place where racist symbols have appeared in public and many people of color in Central Oregon say they have encountered stares and comments that make them feel unwelcome.

In late May, Stanfield made a post to her personal Facebook page about the upcoming event.

“If you as a white person have EVER fixed your mouth to disrespect the Black women who got the ball rolling in Central Oregon… you are not invited to a celebration meant to uplift us,” the post stated.

It was the words “invited” and “white” that caused senior city staffers to call for an emergency meeting about whether Stanfield should lose the funding they promised for Juneteenth.

A complaint

Brenda Betsch Parazoo saw the Facebook comment and on May 22 wrote to Mayor Melanie Kebler, asking her to pull city support for Juneteenth. The same day, the city finalized its sponsorship agreement with Stanfield.

OPB reached out to Parazoo for comment multiple times but she did not respond.

Parazoo’s email, which included the transcript of Stanfield’s post, mobilized senior staffers — including City Manager Eric King — almost immediately.

“If true,” King wrote in an email, “the statements on social media referenced below, would be a violation of the use of sponsorship funds according to our current policy.” He copied Goss into the thread, who put a hold on Stanfield’s sponsorship funds.

Stanfield and Moon had been waiting on the funding since April. “We were expecting maybe a one-to-two week wait, but it ended up being quite a while,” Stanfield said.

They did not expect to be waiting on the money until just 14 days before the Juneteenth event.

The city’s decision to hold the money delayed payments to Black performers scheduled to attend the event and caused problems securing the venue, she added.

City communications

At one point Mayor Kebler suggested reaching out to Stanfield to have a conversation with her about the Facebook post.

Stanfield said she would have been happy to explain what her words meant, but learning about the concerns they caused was disappointing to her.

“I can’t really use the word white or the word Black here without it being a trigger in some kind of way,” she said. “It was this moment of, ‘OK, they still don’t know the history of why it’s different for Black people to discuss discrimination and racism that we face from white people.’”

When asked by OPB what part of Stanfield’s post concerned him, King said he didn’t have it in front of him and couldn’t say for sure.

“I think it was based on race, right?” King said. When provided a transcript of the post, he returned repeatedly to the word invited.

“The concern is when you start saying, we don’t want to invite people, that’s where it’s really difficult as a public agency to sort of regulate that in some sort of way,” he said. “We do need to make sure our events are open to everybody.”

When sponsoring events, the city must make them open to all of the public, the city manager added.

Stanfield said no one from the city ever reached out to her to discuss the post, despite King telling OPB that a staff member had reached out to her.

“They could have called me, the city has my number,” she said.

If someone had, they would have learned that Stanfield made a follow-up post on Facebook clarifying that the Juneteenth event was open to all. That post went up the same day the city organized its emergency meeting.

“Never once — literally not once — have I ever stated that all white people aren’t allowed at the upcoming Juneteenth celebration in Bend, Oregon.” She added, “What I have stated — and stand by — is that white people who have felt comfortable showing their racism, hate, misogynoir and prejudice are NOT welcome at a Juneteenth event. The event isn’t for them. That is on period.”

King said he never saw the follow-up post. If he had, he said, that would have cleared things up for him and he wouldn’t have held back the $5,000 check.

Delayed payment

Under King’s direction, Stanfield and Moon didn’t receive their check until two weeks before the event. He said he wanted to ensure that the event was open to everyone, and the best time to do that was at a pre-event planning meeting.

Stanfield remembered the June 6 pre-event meeting and said it started out normal. They discussed the run of day security, and when it came time to receive the check, she said the room became uncomfortable.

“They looked at me and they were like, ‘We need to confirm that this event is open and welcome to everybody,’” she recalled. “And I was like, ‘yeah, it is.’”

Stanfield said the city’s community relations manager, Kathi Barguil, who is Afro-Latina, was at the meeting and her white colleagues prompted her to ask Stanfield if everyone was welcome at Juneteenth. Barguil declined to comment for this story, but public records show she was at the meeting.

Barguil has a direct relationship with Stanfield, King said, and she works closely with the equity and inclusion department, which is why she was involved.

King said he felt the way he went about handling the complaint was fair.

Future Juneteenth events

When it came time to support Black people in Central Oregon, Stanfield said, city staff were disconnected from the local community and that they don’t understand what Black people deal with on a daily basis.

If they did, she said, “they would’ve understood every single word of my post and where I was coming from and what it meant. That wouldn’t have been misconstrued as me saying, all white people aren’t welcome.”

Stanfield said her call for a space free from racism was weaponized against her.

In the future, she said she won’t be asking the City of Bend for any financial support. But that won’t stop her from putting on more Juneteenth events, she said. Stanfield said she’s already scheduled next year’s event.

“It was definitely a reminder that the power and the liberation for Black people lies in community and it lies in the grassroots networks that we build,” she said. “I got burned for a second, put my hand on the stove, but that’s alright — I wanted to give them [the city] a chance.”

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/08/01/bend-oregon-juneteenth-black-african-american-culture-event-inclusivity/