Juneteenth amid racism reckoning

Celebration with a virtual observance and protest planned for Tulsa

WITH most formal Juneteenth events cancelled due to Covid-19 concerns, street marches and “car caravans” were planned yesterday across the US to demand racial justice on the day commemorating the end of slavery a century and a half ago.

Despite the limitations, the occasion holds particular significance this year, organisers said, coming at a time of national soul-searching over America’s troubled racial history triggered by the death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis.

Mounting demands to end police brutality and racial injustice were the focus of rallies in cities coast to coast, including in New York, Washington, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Chicago and Los Angeles. In Texas, where Juneteenth originated, Lucy Bremond oversees what is believed to be the oldest public celebration of the occasion each year in Houston’s Emancipation Park, located in the Third Ward area where Floyd spent most of his life.

“There are a lot of people who did not even know Juneteenth existed until these past few weeks.

”This year a gathering that typically draws some 6000 people to the park, bought by freed slaves in 1872 to hold a Juneteenth celebration, was replaced with a virtual observance.

Juneteenth, a blend of June and 19th, commemorates the US abolition of slavery under President Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, belatedly announced by a Union army in Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865, after the Civil War ended.

Texas made it a holiday in 1980, and 45 more states and the District of Columbia have followed suit. This year, a number of a companies declared June 19, also known as Emancipation Day or Freedom Day, a paid holiday.

Juneteenth takes on raw emotion this year in Atlanta, where a black man was fatally shot last week in the back by a white policeman in the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant. The policeman was terminated by the department and charged with murder.

Atlantans planned to mark the day with a march to Centennial Olympic Park that organisers say will have a spiritual, rather than celebratory, tone.

A focal point of Juneteenth observances this year is likely to be Tulsa, Oklahoma. President Donald Trump was travelling there for his first campaign rally in three months, originally scheduled for yesterday but moved to today after public outcry. Juneteenth organisers were planning an event there expected to draw tens of thousands yesterday, local media reported.

In other news yesterday, AP reported that Sony’s RCA Records, RCA Inspiration and Legacy Recordings released a never-before-heard solo version of the late Aretha Franklin’s powerful collaboration with Mary J Blige about faith and race, Never Gonna Break My

Faith, to celebrate the emancipation of black people.