Champaign-Urbana MTD highlights local Black history with Juneteenth bus design
CHAMPAIGN COUNTY, Ill. (WCIA) — Passengers in Champaign-Urbana will have an opportunity to learn about Juneteenth and local Black history. It’s all through a new bus design that the Mass Transit District unveiled on Saturday.
It honors Juneteenth and African-American history through art. This is the second year MTD has created a bus design to celebrate Juneteenth, but this year, they wanted to honor the holiday and what it stands for.
“When I see the bus driving by, yes, I’m going to feel a sense of pride,” said artist Stacey Robinson, who helped design the exterior of the bus. “I’m going to feel a sense of joy as well, because I was able to give back to the community.”
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MTD cut the ribbon and introduced a new bus design. Their Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee collaborated with the Champaign County African American Heritage Trail.
This year brought a local emphasis to a nationally celebrated holiday: Juneteenth.
“There’s so much education on the outside of the bus, as well as on the inside,” MTS Operator Tonoa Penn said. “I highly suggest for the community to come up and look at this beautiful bus that the DEI Committee created and all the input and time that we gave to this.”
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“[For] the interiors, we worked closely with the African American Heritage Trail. About a third of the cards inside are talking about Juneteenth and history,” MTD Marketing Manager Autumn Soliman said. “But the rest of it is all talking about local Black history and what that history is for Champaign County.”
The outside of the bus displays a design created by two local artists.
“We had spent months looking at this on our computer screen, and then just to see it to full-scale was just — I can’t even describe. It’s just an amazing feeling,” artist Kamu Grantham said.
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Grantham said he wanted to expand on last year’s design.
“I don’t think we were conscious about thinking about bigger and better. We just wanted to come up with a design that we thought represented what we do as artists and also was in line with the theme of Juneteenth,” he said, “and celebrating freedom, celebrating African-American history, celebrating American history. And so I think that’s just what we were thinking about.”
Robinson said their design carries extra weight for the holiday and history as a whole.
“The project is called, ‘We Are the Sankofa People of Tomorrow,’ and Sankofa is a Ghanaian term, which means ‘to go back and get it.’ So, as we go into the future, we purposely go back and get our past and bring that pride into the future with us. And I think that’s the perfect way to think about Juneteenth, as this kind of emergent national holiday.”
People can expect to see this new bus hit the roadways soon. MTD said this project is a stepping stone for more like it in the future.
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