A link-up initiated by a group of friends who didn’t want to wait until homecoming to reunite has become a city-wide festival bringing HBCU graduates, students and everyone in between together in the name of fun and fellowship.
Formerly Dear Summer BBQ, the Dear Summer Festival was created in 2011 by Virginia State University and Delaware State University alums as a barbecue in Harlem. Its mission is to cultivate a safe, inclusive and diverse community for young professionals across all industries. The goal is to give alums the opportunity to reconnect outside of the annual trek to the yard for homecoming during the hottest season of the year.
Surpassing their wildest dreams
“We didn’t even imagine it to be like this,” Rodney Henry, vice president of The Silent Majority, the organization behind the event, told Blavity. “It started as Love Day, a couple of fellas getting together because we had graduated from college, and we still, in a mushy way, kind of missed each other. We still wanted to figure out how we could get everybody together and still have a good time, so we started to do this thing. We called it Love Day, where a couple of the guys put some money together, we’d get some food and drinks, and some of their family members would cook on the grill or provide food. Every year, leading up to our big Dear Summer BBQ, we were flooding out Morningside Park, from the top of the park to the bottom.”
He credited Shareef Moore, a founding member and also the president of The Silent Majority, with first initiating a discussion of plans to scale the event up, something that Henry said he initially had reservations about, not wanting the annual barbecue, which came with free food and drinks, to lose the essence of why it was started in the first place…