Started By HBCU Grads, Dear Summer Festival Has Grown Into A National Celebration Of Black Culture

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.

“It was a vibe, and I said, ‘I think if you take that away, where we start having to make patrons pay, we’re going to lose some of that crowd,’” he said. “He looked at me like I had five heads and said, ‘What are you talking about? This is a thing to go to during the summer.’ So we had a meeting, a couple of us, and we said, ‘Hey, look, man, we want to change this up. We need to put it in a more secure location. You know, let’s scale it up a little bit and elevate it.’ We did it the first year, and no numbers dropped; it increased. And we were like, ‘Oh, hold on.’ We did it another year, and then it just kept scaling up and up. It was like, hey, we got something here. We had the vibe for the summer, and we shifted the culture. Morningside Park in New York — it’s started there.”

How the event has expanded over the years

Today, the Dear Summer Festival draws over 7,500 people across cities like New York, Atlanta, Houston and Washington, D.C. With over a decade under its belt, the event continues to expand and elevate each year, including a stop in Philadelphia to kick off the summer with a pop-up at this year’s Roots Picnic. 

Despite the changes, at the core of the event is pride and commitment, and that it is curated by individuals from all walks of life whose commonality lies in having attended an HBCU.

“A lot of it has to do with the vibe, or the camaraderie, and the feeling you get around homecoming,” Dwaynne Walker-Dixon, chief financial officer for The Silent Majority, said. “I mean, you have all of these events happening, sometimes all at once, but the yard is kind of like the mainstay. So that was like, I would say, the focus. You have all the Greeks, old heads, current students, alumni, everybody. The Greeks had their activations for their oldheads that came through, and then all these non-Greek organizations also had their thing. Then you have a full court, or like a strip, speaking for Virginia State, where all the food is placed, and then we have something called the backyard, behind Foster. So, behind Foster is where everybody’s gathering, everybody’s chilling, and it’s just a good time, and that’s the feeling that we missed, where there are no worries. Whatever was going on in life, it didn’t matter, because homecoming was here and you were with your boys, you were with your girls, and it was just a great time. That’s the feeling that we were successful at re-creating.”

Last year, the Dear Summer Festival New York stop featured a performance from legendary rapper Jadakiss, with Moneybagg Yo gracing the stage during the installment held in Washington, D.C. While the event is by no means a music festival, the goal is to continue to incorporate what feels right and stay committed to providing vibes with good energy, music and connection for people to take advantage of. Ultimately, the aim is to have several acts throughout the day, but they’re still testing out what feels right and building as they go.

The Dear Summer Festival is rooted in community, culture and connection

The event creators are focused not just on offering up a fun party for the community of HBCU students who attend the annual festival, but also on ensuring that the fest pours back into the areas that host it.

“One thing with Dear Summer that I think has helped out a lot, just from what I’ve seen over the years is, we’re really big in the community — not just community service, but hiring people. That’s minority-owned businesses, like people that come to the event, food vendors, Black-owned event planners, I’m talking about DJs, videographers, photographers, bartenders, the list goes on,” added Andrew Robotham, chief marketing officer for the The Silent Majority. “With the amount of people we employ for these events, it’s, I mean, me and Dwaynne look at the numbers a lot, we do our fair share of helping the economy, and it stays within the Black and brown community, and that’s one thing that we pride ourselves on. We look at that as a way of doing our part in general. We see other races, how they handle things, and we kind of want to be the same, where it’s like you keep the money in the circle and in the same type of pot, which is just good for longevity and community growth.”

Dear Summer Festival is a testament to how the friends you make in college often become lifelong connections, something that the guys said they hope continues to inspire and uplift the generations after them. The kickoff for this year’s summer season begins with the Roots Picnic pop-up in Philly on May 31, followed by stops in New York, Atlanta, Washington, D.C., and Houston from June to September.