For Immediate Release
Contact: press@blmgrassroots.org
June 19, 2025
Juneteenth is OUR BLACK JUBILEE
June 19, 1865 marks the day that our enslaved Ancestors in Texas received word that our generations of struggle to free ourselves toppled legal chattel slavery (at least in the current form). On this date our grandmothers’ grandmothers and our grandfathers’ grandfathers turned to each other in love and power to celebrate our beauty, our humanity, and divinity…despite an entire infrastructure and economy that tried to turn us into property.
We took a moment to restore ourselves in each others’ laughter, reclaimed our own bodies as we danced, filled our very souls with good food and fervent prayer before setting out on a quest to reunite our families, build autonomous communities, plot, plan, and fight for complete and total freedom.
This Juneteenth, may every Black person stand in collective joy, freedom, and the warmth of one another. Let’s drink red soda, eat fried chicken and watermelon, slam some bones, and do the electric slide until we feel Frankie Beverly’s smile beaming down from the heavens. May our laughter summon in every righteous Ancestor, call our children closer, and make the ground softer for our progeny. May our hearts dance and our souls open as we abound in the miracle of our people.
For everyone else…
Ask how you can serve.
Non-Black People of Color…
We need you to confront and smash the anti-Blackness in your own communities and economies, at your own dinner tables, in your own hearts. Stop using the n-word…no matter how cool you think you are with us. Make our struggles your own. Work to defeat our common enemy – white-supremacist capitalism.
White folks…
It’s time to pay reparations. Commit yourselves to real reparations policies that hold accountable the government, white-supremacist capitalism, and white people – who continue to benefit from our generations of stolen labor. Slide your Black friend some benjamins. Make a check out to Black liberation organizations, like BLM Grassroots. Don’t have money? Wash your neighbor’s car. Watch her kids. Give him a ride. Sweep their front stoop.
Do not ask to come to the cookout.
#Juneteenth
#Jubilee
#Solidarity
#Reparations
