The annual Winthrop High Football Father’s Day Pancake Breakfast that serves as the chief fundraiser for the Winthrop High football program is set for this Sunday morning, June 21, from 8-12.

This annual event has been a Viking tradition for more than 50 years — and no doubt there are some grand-dads who attended this event as youngsters who will be on hand with their grandchildren this Sunday.

The cost is just $10.00 for all-you-can-eat pancakes and other breakfast fixins’. Tickets may be purchased at the door.

The Winthrop High athletics program, under the excellent direction of Athletic Directoir Mark DeGregorio, relies heavily on the support of the entire community, and the Pancake Breakfast has always been a great way to get together with friends and family to express their appreciation for our student-athletes. 

We urge as many of our fellow residents as possible to attend this popular event to show their support for WHS football coach Jon Cadigan (who is following in the footsteps of former outstanding coaches such as Bob DeFelice, Tony Fucillo, and Sean Dricoll) and the 2026 WHS football team who will be serving up the pancakes this Sunday morning. 

Juneteenth is more significant than ever

Juneteenth, which has been a national holiday since 2021, marks the day when the Union Army entered the city of Galveston on June 19, 1865, and formally freed those who still were being enslaved in Texas.

 As the Union Army advanced through the South in the final months of the Civil War, Confederate slave-owners in states such as Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas forced tens of thousands of slaves to go to Texas, which was the only Southern state where the Union Army had not taken full control during the Civil War.

Until Major General Gordon Granger issued his order on June 19, more than 250,000 enslaved individuals in Texas had been unaware that they were free men, even though the Emancipation Proclamation had been issued more than two years earlier (on January 1, 1863) and the South had surrendered on April 9, 1865.

Juneteenth celebrations began as early as the following year and expanded over the decades across the country. However, they remained largely local celebrations  until President Joe Biden signed into law the official observance of Juneteenth as a federal holiday.

Juneteenth serves to remind us of our nation’s tragic past and of the hope for a better future, as often expressed by Dr. Martin Luther King: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

However, that arc has reversed course in the past few months. The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent evisceration of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (which had created Black-majority voting districts to ensure persons of color would be represented in Congress in the South), has turned back the clock, allowing for gross gerrymandering of Congressional districts that will largely eliminate Black representation.

In addition, many states, especially Texas, have enacted laws that have criminalized traditional voter registration efforts that sought to bring Blacks and Latinos into the political process. These new laws, which have resulted in the arrests of voting-rights activists, have cast a pall of fear that are significantly reducing Black and Latino voter registration in Southern states.

It is not an exaggeration to say that, thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court and Republican-dominated state legislatures in the Southern states, a 21st century version of Jim Crow (the term used for the post-Civil War laws that marginalized former slaves in the political process) is on the rise in the South.

So as we celebrate Juneteenth, let us resolve to restore the broken arc of the moral universe in order to ensure the full participation in our democracy by every American.