Living up to its manifesto, this past Sunday, The Lay Out hosted its fifth annual Juneteenth celebration at Fort Greene Park—filled with intergenerational displays of Black joy including dominoes, cards, double dutch, and musical performances. CEO and founder, Emily Anadu was among one of them, as she excitedly abandoned her shoes to join the fun and jump rope.
Lining the perimeter of the park, the event featured their flagship BuyBLK. ByBLK. marketplace with over 40 Black businesses ranging from soap shops and snack vendors to clothing brands and book retailers. The event also included an assembly line of volunteers with nonprofit One Love Community Fridge handing out cooler bags and fresh produce.
With its inception rooted in the mindset of “peace as a form of resistance,” The Lay Out grew from outdoor kickbacks to full-scale events that lie at the intersection of what Anadu calls the “Joy Ecosystem” of social impact, Black expression, and cooperative economics.
Though Anadu described her journey to The Lay Out as a “meandering” one, she said it was always one to community — whether it was being one of a few Black students during undergrad at Dartmouth or working in the video game industry.
“I’ve always been focused on creating safety for people and creating comfort, even if I’m not necessarily from the community I’m trying to create comfort for,” she said.
Raised between Nigeria and Houston for the early parts of her life, Anadu is not afraid to admit her role in gentrification. But after living in Fort Greene for nearly two decades, she says that she has always loved the neighborhood for what it was.
“I didn’t come here thinking it has good bones that need to be—that could be—used,” she said.
Instead, Anadu has found comfort in the neighborhood. After months of isolation during the pandemic, she found herself at the park often. However, she soon grew to feel “othered” as a Black woman in the park, hyper aware of how the neighborhood had changed.
Following the murder of George Floyd, Anadu missed her community, her “people.”
So, on June 4, 2020, she spoke the idea out loud for The Lay Out. Three days later, with the support of her four friends, Anadu hosted the collective’s first ever event at the park, and the rest was history.
For Anadu, The Lay Out is an unapologetic assertion of Black joy.
“There’s a climate that is trying to make us feel like we should just shut up or that our pain, we need to get over things,” Anadu shared. “But fundamentally, we are a people that have persisted despite everything, and we have always done that with joy, with laughter. There’s just nothing like the magic of us coming together.”
Anadu explained that it is important, now more than ever, to center Blackness in the face of efforts to “erase the pain and the struggle of Black people in this country.” She asserts that there is a distinction between wallowing in and acknowledging a long legacy of slavery.
“To act like it didn’t happen lets people ignore that we are not as far along economically,” she said. “At a sociological level, at a biological level we exist in conditions that make it hard.”
And it is her investment in the economic empowerment of her people that drives Anadu’s work. While she foresees growth within The Lay Out’s near future, her focus is on cultivating the community, not an audience.
“Part of us getting to true joy is being able to sustain ourselves, and a lot of that is giving people the opportunity to get their art, to get their craft, to get their food, to get whatever out in the world,” she said.
“Economic empowerment as a basis for everything is one of the things I really see growing from it. But also just [having] a good time.”