Caribbean Life News reports that New York’s Caribbean J’Ouvert festival has been moved from pre-dawn hours to daylight hours just before the massive West Indian American Day Carnival Parade on Brooklyn’s Eastern Parkway gets underway on September 4.

Organizers, hoping for a fresh start at this year’s J’Ouvert celebrations, have a new weapon – sunlight – against gangs and gun violence that have plagued the annual festival in Brooklyn on the first Monday in September, Labor Day, according to New York’s Daily News.

[. . .] Traditionally, J’Ouvert begins at about 2 am, but the new hours for the permitted procession will start at 6 am and end at 11 am, Trinidadian Yvette Rennie, president of J’Ouvert City, organizers of the annual Caribbean celebration, told the Daily News. Rennie, according to the Daily News, said the change is being made specifically to stop the violence and is “a combination of all our concerns, because we are extremely concerned that darkness is when everything (bad) happens.”

[. . .] J’Ouvert, which means “daybreak,” precedes Brooklyn’s West Indian American Day Carnival Parade, but is not affiliated with it [. . .].

For full article, see http://www.caribbeanlifenews.com/stories/2017/8/2017-08-04-nk-jouvert-moved-to-daylight-hours-cl.html

Photo above from 2015 article “Violence Casts a Shadow Over J’ouvert Celebration in Brooklyn”: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/09/nyregion/violence-casts-a-shadow-over-jouvert-celebration-in-brooklyn.html