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A week ago, the Bush theatre asked six writers for their dramatised responses to the killing of George Floyd in Minnesota, the global protests that followed and the state society is in now. These protest plays, curated by Daniel Bailey, are the result of that quickfire commission. Combining political theatre with digital technology, they are available across the Bushs social media platforms, including Twitter and Instagram, and on YouTube. They range in length from one to nine minutes and are honest, impactful pieces that turn life, as it is happening, into story and sometimes song.

Just as in the case of Channel Fours week-long series of short films, Take Your Knee Off My Neck, these works are by black British (or mixed-heritage) writers. Issues range from the use of the N-word to negotiating mixed-heritage identity and the emotional load of having to articulate the trauma caused by racism over and over again, the last of which is expressed in Benedict Lombes direct address, Do You Hear Us Now?

Fehinti Balogun, who appears in Michaela Coels BBC/HBO series I May Destroy You, bases his film, You Just Dont Get it And it Hurts, on a recent conversation with a friend. It is a series of text messages between Chelsea, who is white, and an unnamed black friend. They begin debating Chelseas use of the N-word while singing along to a rap song in a predominantly white crowd. Chelsea promises to listen to her friends objections open-mindedly (I wont be offended) but is unwilling to examine her values, clinging to an argument around her right to free speech. It is noxious everyday racism and their conversation, played out with the typing and erasing of words, is both intellectually engaging and emotive, right until Chelseas final, undermining text.

Roy Williamss film, Black, packs another punch at just over a minute long. Performed by Aaron Pierre, it features a man in internal, anguished dialogue with himself as he tries to fight his fear of attending a protest rally: Im scared, no word of a lie Why they have to beat us like that? It is a moving snapshot of vulnerable black masculinity in light of Floyds killing and the increased threat felt by black men in Britain. The Fire This Time is a rap by Kalungi Ssebandeke (featuring Anoushka Lucas) and a more straight-up protest song against police violence. You will no longer kill us, sings Ssebandeke against footage of street protests, riots and arrests.

In Hey Kid, Matilda Ibini speaks to a photographic montage of her younger selves: Hold on to your voice, kid, Ibini tells the child in a nursery school pinafore. People will tell you that everything about you is wrong Please do not stay silent. It is both a warning of the structural racism that awaits this child and a call to arms, with echoes of the consciousness-raising letters written by James Baldwin to his young nephew in 1962 and Ta-Nehisi Coates to his son in 2015.

Alongside the pain and anger, a sense of exhaustion is also expressed in several films at the repeated cycles of protest at white-on-black violence over the decades. Anoushka Lucas, in Your Work, which is delivered partly in song, sings: All the things Ive heard before are coming around again, while Lombe is more explicit: After black squares and hashtags and outrage, will you still show up?

It is a powerful question asked of the world and it remains unanswered.

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The Protest review superb set of dramas for the Black Lives Matter movement - The Guardian

Thousands of protesters gathered on a highway for a Justice for George Floyd rally in Ann Arbor, Mich. (Andrew Boydston / Shutterstock)

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They were relegated to the protest equivalent of a ghetto. Their assigned route shunted them to the far fringes of the city. Their demonstration was destined for an ignominious demise far from any main thoroughfare, out of sight of most apartment buildings, out of earshot of most homes, best viewed from a dinghy bobbing in the Hudson River.Ad Policy

Those at the head of the march had other ideas. After a brief stop at city hall, they turned the crowd onto the main drag, Washington Street, and for the next few hours, a parade of protesters snaked through Hoboken, N.J.

Whose streets? Our streets! is a well-worn activist chant, but for a little while it was true as Hobokens motorcycle cops played catch-up and the march turned this way and thatfirst, uptown on Washington, where a conspicuous minority of businesses were boarded up, expecting trouble that never came. Then, a left onto Sixth, another onto Jackson. Monroe. Park. Finally, back to Washington and onward.

All the while, the voices of the mostly white marchers, being led in call-and-response chants mainly by people of color, rang through the streets and echoed off high-rent low-rises.

Hands up! Dont shoot!

No justice! No peace!

Say his name! George Floyd!Current Issue

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As an ever-more middle-aged white guy who, a decade ago, traded covering US protests for reporting from African war zones, I have little of substance to add to the superlative coverage of the Black Lives Matter demonstrations that have erupted across the country in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd. For that, read some of the journalists who are on the front lines innovating and elevating the craft, like the great Aviva Stahls real-time eyewitness observations, incisive interviews, and on-the-fly fact-checking, while marching for miles and miles through the streets of Brooklyn, N.Y.

Instead, bear with me while I ruminate about something I said to Tom Engelhardt, the editor of this website, TomDispatch, at the beginning of March when our lives changed forever. Instead of simply bemoaning the onslaught of the Covid-19 pandemichowever devastating and deadly it might prove to beI uncharacteristically looked on the bright side, suggesting that this could be one of those rare transformative moments that shifts the worlds axis and leads to revolutionary change.

I bring this up not to brag about my prescience, but to point out the very oppositehow little foresight I actually had. Its desperately difficult for any of us to predict the future and yet, thanks so often to the long, hard, and sometimes remarkably dangerous work of organizers and activists, even the most seemingly immutable things can change over time and under the right conditions.

Despite my comments to Tom, if you had told me that, in the span of a few months, a novel coronavirus that dates back only to last year and systemic American racism that dates back to 1619 would somehow intersect, I wouldnt have believed it. If you had told me that a man named George Floyd would survive Covid-19 only to be murdered by the police and that his brutal death would spark a worldwide movement, leading the council members of a major American city to announce their intent to defund the police and Europeans halfway across the planet to deface monuments to a murderous 19 century monarch who slaughtered Africans, I would have dismissed you. But history works in mysterious ways.

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Four hundred years of racism, systemic abuse of authority, unpunished police misconduct, white skin privilege, and a host of other evils at the dark core of America gave a white Minneapolis police officer the license to press a black mans face to the pavement and jam a knee into his neck for nearly nine minutes. For allegedly attempting to buy a pack of cigarettes with a phony $20 bill, George Floyd was killed at the intersection of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue in Minneapolis, Minn., by police officer Derek Chauvin.

At the beginning of the last century, whites could murder a black man, woman, or child in this country as part of a public celebration, memorialize it on postcards, and mail them to friends. Between 1877 and 1950, nearly 4,000 blacks were lynched in the American South, more than a death a week for 73 years. But the murders of blacks, whether at the hands of their owners in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries or of unaccountable fellow Americans in the latter 19th and 20th centuries never ended despite changes in some attitudes, significant federal legislation, and the notable successes of the protests, marches, and activism of the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

From 2006 to 2012, in fact, a white police officer killed a black person in America almost twice a week, according to FBI statistics. And less than a month before we watched the last moments of George Floyds life, we witnessed a modern-day version of a lynching when Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old black man, was gunned down while jogging on a suburban street in Glynn County, Ga. Gregory McMichael, a 64-year-old white retired district attorney, investigator, and police detective, and his son Travis, 34, were eventually arrested and charged with his murder.

Without the Covid-19 pandemic and the Trump administrations botched response to it, without black Americans dying of the disease at three times the rate of whites, without the suddenly spotlighted health disparities that have always consigned people of color to die at elevated rates, without a confluence of so many horrors that the black community in America has suffered for so long coupled with those of a new virus, would we be in the place were in today?

If President Trump hadnt cheered on the efforts of mostly older white protesters to end pandemic shutdowns and liberate their states and then echoed a racist Miami police chief of the 1960s who promised when the looting starts, the shooting starts, essentially calling for young black protesters to be gunned down, would the present movement have taken off in such a way? And would these protests have been as powerful if people who had avoided outside contact for weeks hadnt suddenly decided to risk their own lives and those of others around them because this murder was too brazen, too likely to end in injustice for private handwringing and public hashtags?

In Minneapolis, where George Floyd drew his last embattled breath, a veto-proof majority of the city council recently announced their commitment to disbanding the citys police department. As council president Lisa Bender put it:

Were here because we hear you. We are here today because George Floyd was killed by the Minneapolis police. We are here because here in Minneapolis and in cities across the United States it is clear that our existing system of policing and public safety is not keeping our communities safe. Our efforts at incremental reform have failed. Period.

A month ago, such a statement by almost any council chief in any American citymuch less similar sentiments voiced across the nationwould have been essentially unthinkable. Only small numbers of activists working away with tiny chisels on a mountain of official intransigence could even have imagined such a thing and they would have been dismissed by the punditocracy as delusional.

But the reverberations of George Floyds death have hardly been confined to the city where he was slain or even the country whose systemic bigotry put a target on his back for 46 years. His death and Americas rampant racism have led to soul-searching across the globe, sparking protests against discrimination and police brutality from Australia to Germany, Argentina to Kenya. In Ghent, Belgium, a bust honoring King Leopold II was defaced and covered with a hood bearing Floyds dying plea: I cant breathe. In Antwerp, Leopolds statue was set on fire and later removed.

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It was Leopold, as TomDispatch regular Adam Hochschild so memorably documented in King Leopolds Ghost, who, in the late 19th century, seized the vast territory surrounding Africas Congo River, looted its rubber, brutalized its people, and presided over a fin de sicle holocaust that took the lives of as many as 10 million people, roughly half the Congos population. Belgian activists are now calling for all the countrys statues and monuments to the murderous monarch to be torn down.

Like the island off its coast, Hoboken was born of a great swindle. In 1658, the Dutch governor of Manhattan reportedly bought the tract of land that now includes that mile-square New Jersey city from the Lenape people for some wampum, cloth, kettles, blankets, six guns andfittingly enough, given Hobokens startling bars-to-area ratiohalf a barrel of beer.

In other words, the city where I covered that demonstration is part and parcel of the settler colonialism, slavery, and racism that forms the bedrock of this nation. But even in that white enclave, that bastion of 21st century gentrification, in the midst of a lethal global pandemic with no cure, 10,000 people flooded its parks and streets, carrying signs like Racism is a pandemic, too and Covid is not the only killer that would have made little sense six months ago.

There were also posters that would have been shocking in Hoboken only several weeks ago, but didnt cause anyone to bat an eye, like ACAB (an acronym for All Cops are Bastards) or

Are you a:

[ ] Killer cop

[ ] Complicit Cop

Not to mention dozens and dozens of signs reading Defund the Police or Abolish the Police. Suddenlyto most of us, at leastsuch proposals were on the table.

In reality, social change rarely occurs by accident or chance. It usually comes in the wake of years of relentless, thankless, grinding activism. It also takes a willingness to head for the barricades when history has illuminated the dangers of doing so. It requires persistence in the face of weariness and distraction, and courage in the face of abject adversity.

Where this movement goes, how it changes this nation, and what it spawns around the world will be won or lost on the streets of our tomorrows. Will it mean an America that inches closer to long-articulated but never remotely approached ideals, or usher in a backlash that leads to a wave of politicians in the Trumpian mold? In moments like this, theres no way of knowing whether youre on the cusp of a cultural renaissance or a societal Black Death.

It takes a long time, but Earths orbit and axis do change, and once they do, things are never the same again. Already, from Minneapolis to Antwerp to modest Hoboken, this world is not what it was just a short while ago. A man forced to die with his face pressed to the ground may yet shift the earth under your feet.

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The Black Lives Matter Protests Are a Tipping Point in US History - The Nation

Protesters march through downtown Louisville on June 5.

It's May 30. From a perch several stories above downtown Louisville, Kentucky, a cacophony of sirens and chants engulf my apartment in the night. Protesters take over the main drag of the city, Broadway, crying out for justice for a woman killed in her bed by police officers in a no-knock raid in March. The sound of her name, Breonna Taylor, rises above the occasional gunshots and flash-bangs, which can be heard in intermittent, alternating blasts.

By 10:30 p.m. the cops have surrounded my building with more than a dozen cruisers. I peer over the edge of the railing and see a handful of officers walking into the complex.

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I pick up the phone and call Shelby Brown, a colleague whose quick-draw news reflexes are matched only by the steadiness of her hand on the wheel -- and her work in social justice outside of the newsroom. No editor assigned this job to us. We're just two journalists doing what we know how to do, rushing toward the news as it crashes into the scene around us.

The view of a protest from my apartment building.

"Get a pen and take this down," I say, tying my boots with the phone pressed between my shoulder and chin.

I give her my Social Security number and date of birth, and we set a call-back time and follow-up protocols. I grab a Sharpie and scribble an emergency phone number on my arm. Shelby whips out her laptop. Within moments, she's pulled together multiple screens that feed her live information about police and protest activity -- from Twitter, video livestreams, police scanners and news sites. She recites what's happening to me with clinical calm, directing my next steps as I cram cash, ID and a camera into a shoulder bag.

My day job is to write about technology, stress testing and critically evaluating the latest software, apps and services. But today, my years spent covering protests and politics for news publications snap into focus again and instinct takes over. Just like before, I have all the tech tools I need to record a piece of civil rights history. This time it's different, though. This time it's happening right outside my front door.

It's 2014 all over again, with the rise of social media once more offering everyone the chance to be a citizen journalist, just as it did amid the protests following the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Social media has changed the way people protest, as well as how we document instances of racial injustice at the hands of institutions of power. Even so, four years later a Pew survey would find US newsrooms were still less racially diverse than most other industries, with 77% of reporters, editors, photographers and videographers identifying as non-Hispanic whites.

Shelby and I decided to cover the protests on social media not as part of a mainstream news organization, but for our own record -- to bear witness and become a part of the powerful corrective force composed of thousands of voices around the world, clamoring for racial justice and police reform as the fight literally hits our backyard.

Waves of protesters -- about half of whom appear to be young people of color, recording with their phones -- flood into the streets around my apartment building. I answer their calls as quickly as Shelby answers mine, each of us knowing a moment has arrived from which none of us are exempt.

Over the next week, Shelby and I work in tandem over the phone, paying close attention to the rhythm of each evening's political actions in Louisville. The ground control to my Major Tom, the Ned to my Peter Parker, Shelby stays in my ear navigating as I take to the streets to document police actions and protesting voices. From her home outside the city, she monitors police scanner activity and helicopter flight patterns. She shares updates from Gov. Andy Beshear and Mayor Greg Fischer. She tells me she's checking three screens' worth of local news and live streams.

On May 31, nearly an hour before the sunset curfew, a line of officers in riot gear advance on the peaceful assembly and begin firing round after round of pepper balls and flash bangs directly at the crowd, who scatter into alleys. Still rolling tape, a local NPR reporter and I are among the last shoes on the street, some 15 paces from the police. We're surrounded by noxious fumes. A flash bang whizzes past both of our heads as we dart to avoid it.

Shelby is sending me location updates when the police start firing pepper balls. By this time, the police had previously shot two Louisville journalists intentionally with pepper balls in a separate incident. I jump a couple of feet into the air to avoid being hit as one sails past my legs.

The Louisville Police Department would later claim their charging of the crowd was a necessary measure because they saw a protester with a leaf-blower, a device activists regularly bring to peaceful protests to disperse tear gas. They claimed the assembly was unlawful because the man holding the leaf-blower had somehow loaded bleach into the appliance.

When reporters asked about the leaf blower at a press conference later that day, law enforcement officials backpedaled on the bleach accusation and said police know that sometimes the blowers are used to disperse chemical gases used against protesters.

"They weren't going to blow leaves," Assistant Chief of Police LaVita Chavous told reporters.

Once again, social media and the ability for anyone to turn on their phone camera keeps those in power honest: Videos taken by people in the crowd surface online of the man who carried the leaf blower being brutally tackled into submission by at least 10 cops.

This happened two blocks away from my doorstep. None of us are exempt from this moment.

The work of racial justice is still ongoing, and chanting still sounds in the streets in downtown Louisville, the largest city in Kentucky, with a population of about 767,000 people.

As of June 12, Louisville activists have won a handful of victories. Louisville's metro council passed an ordinance called "Breonna's Law," banning no-knock search warrants, and Fischer has called for a full independent review of the police department.

Breonna's name is still being shouted from Tokyo to Paris. Even Beyonc has weighed in on social media, and in a letter calling on Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron to charge the officers responsible for Breonna's death.

People gathered with balloons for a vigil in memory of Breonna Taylor on June 6 in Louisville.

Despite these initial victories, the determination of Louisville's grieving residents and the global momentum toward securing justice, the three officers who shot Breonna Taylor at least eight times in her bed haven't yet been fired or put on trial. Unlike the death of George Floyd, killed by a police officer kneeling on his neck during an arrest, there is no video filmed by an onlooker to capture the nation's attention. Breonna was sleeping in her bed, in her home. And the police officers' body cameras were not turned on.

Military vehicles are no longer being staged at the foot of my building. Shelby and I no longer spend our evenings tracking flash bangs and road blockades. But the police helicopters still come and go at all hours, intermittent now, as police continue to use pepper bullets against protesters, who continue to lock up downtown streets with caravans of honking vehicles.

A journalist's job is to keep the public informed and hold people in power accountable, bringing first-hand experiences to the masses so they can understand the who, what, when, where, why and so what that affects the world around us.

For journalists in my city, a wave of reporting has permanently transmuted how we, and our editors, approach stories about the systemic racism baked into nearly every American institution. Many media outlets have begun to realize that there are no "both sides" to racism. There are only the many sides of how we stop it. It's too soon to declare this a victorious moment for American journalism, though.

I worry that the longer march toward justice, the necessary conversations about reform, may fall silent as the dramatic moments of the city's activism fade. I worry that in this moment our industry will fail to see the opportunity and obligation it has in moving toward media justice, and that it will fall to the wayside in the coming weeks as the news cycle pulls us back in. I worry most that the historical employment gap between white and Black editors, producers and journalists in my field will remain unaddressed in favor of a passing wave of incrementally improved coverage of race relations. I worry that the executive power imbalance in my field will remain the same, despite the greater access to technological news tools we've had since the early aughts.

I have been covering protests for nearly a decade now. My hopes are not buoyed by the sight of another generation of young protesters, disproportionately those of color, who shoulder the traumatic burden of repeatedly documenting Black deaths at the hands of institutionalized racism. I am not satisfied with a narrative that the widespread adoption of social media and new communications technology is sufficient to enact industry-wide reform of mainstream news media.

Citizen journalists and activists documenting police brutality on Twitter have so far not been enough to sufficiently change the racial composition of the boardrooms of US news media enterprises.

None of us should be satisfied. None of us are exempt.

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Here's what it looks like when Black Lives Matter protests literally hit home - CNET

The first time I thought I knew someone famous was when I saw a man we called Byrd on television. I lit up. Byrd, a Black man I recognized as a friend of my dads, was speaking at a press conference. How could I be so lucky to know someone famous enough to make it on television? When I asked my mother, she said that Byrd was sad. How could someone make it on the screen by being sad, I asked. She continued folding clothes and said, Ill tell you when you get older. She said that to me a lot back then.

I later learned that Ross Byrd was on television to talk about the killing of his father. James Byrd Jr., a Black man from Jasper, Texas, was beaten and dragged to death along a three-mile stretch of road by three white supremacists, his body dumped in front of a Black cemetery. That was 1998, and it happened only 55 miles from Lufkin, where I was born and raised.

Its not lost on me that my mother worked to shield me and my siblings and cousins from the realities of living in deep East Texas. And that she taught us how to survive our Blackness: growing up we knew all the places that werent meant for Black and Brown people. We were taught where to avoid in order to keep safe. Now, as an adult, I know that Black people arent even safe in their own homes.

But as protests and demonstrations against police brutality and the mistreatment of African Americans continue nationwide, in East Texas, that same call for justice is beginning to blossom. With more than a century of violence and harassment aimed at Black people in the area, and an insidious history as a home of the Ku Klux Klan, sweeping protests demanding reform have arrived among the thick pine woods and small towns of the region.

In Beaumont, protests have been held outside of city hall. In the historical sundown town of Vidor, more than 100 people showed up to march, despite heavy skepticism that the event was real and not a trap set up by white supremacists. For three weeks, protestors have shown up in Tyler to demand justice and express solidarity. And in Jasper, where James Byrd Jr. was murdered, organizers have gathered to honor Byrd and George Floyd: two Black men who have become involuntary martyrs.

This city has already suffered injustice a decade or two before George Floyd. So, we wanted to honor that, said Jasper protest organizer and congressional candidate Rashad Lewis. But we also wanted to honor the death of James Byrd here in our own city.

Sustained and widespread demonstrations like this have never happened in deep East Texas. And now, protestors are repeating the names of those killed like a hymn sung in Sunday school. An echo behind the Pine Curtain where the seeds of the civil rights movement were planted but never fully took root: Black. Lives. Matter.

Racism and high rates of violence in East Texas can be traced to slavery. By 1860, the vast majority of enslaved Black people in Texaswho made up 30 percent of the states population lived on large cotton plantations in the pineywoods region. Following the Civil War, the region saw some of the most gruesome assaults on Black Texans who dared to celebrate their newly found freedom. Many of those crimes went unpunishedfrom 1865 to 1866, authorities issued 500 indictments statewide for the murder of Blacks by Anglos, but no convictions ever resulted. In the decades that followed, the vast majority of reported lynchings of Black people in the state occurred in East Texas.

Public lynchings of Black people became commonplace in town centers, and in broad daylight. In 1893, Lamar County, in Northeast Texas, ushered in the era of spectacle lynchings when 17-year-old Henry Smith was tortured and burned alive in front of 10,000 onlookers in Paris, Texas, the county seat. Postcards with images of his murder and pieces of his body were sold as souvenirs. At least nine Black men were lynched by white mobs over the next three decades in Paris alone.

White Texans, particularly from East Texas, were determined that white supremacy would be attained, says historian Merline Pitre, a professor at Texas Southern University. Violence was used to keep African Americans in their place.

In 1910, a mob of white vigilantes murdered more than 50 unarmed Black people whose bodies were dumped into unmarked communal pits in Slocum, in Anderson County. No one was ever convicted for the massacre, and even recent attempts to document the murders were blocked by county officials. The Longview Race Riot of 1919, during the Red Summer when white supremacists attacked African Americans in dozens of cities across the nation, resulted in the death of two local businessmen and the destruction of the Black section of town after residents encouraged each other to buy from their own community in response to racism and segregation.

As once prominent lumber towns turned into ghost towns, violence in East Texas would only get worse as the country approached the Great Depression and the New Deal eras.

African Americans were hardest hit by the Great Depression, and by 1935, 90 percent of African American farm laborers in Texas were out of a job. Economic insecurity exacerbated racial terror for Black communities in East Texas, and by the 1940s, racial tensions would bubble over here and around the United States, as African Americans voiced outrage about serving in World War II for a country that did not grant them equal rights.

Beaumont, a shipbuilding center, saw a race riot in 1943 that resulted in hundreds of Black homes and businesses damaged by about 4,000 rioters who were angry over the alleged rape of a white woman by a Black man. More than 200 people were arrested and 50 were injured.

The marches today mean something more than just a call for the end of police brutality. Theyre a demand for an end to all brutality in a community plagued with a long history of tragedy and intimidation.

My family has lived this history of racism and violence. I grew up hearing stories from my pawpaw, my grandpa, of school desegregation in Lufkin in the 70s and of threats and fights. He told me about the time he was accused of trying to rape a white store owners wife who happened to be in the back of the shop while he was delivering sodas. Ive been called n*****, been followed by cops for playing basketball with my little cousins. East Texas has seen lynchings and KKK rallies in my lifetime.

Ive been conflicted the past few weeks seeing the recent protests in a region that many have always regarded as just racist, but which for me is also home. Im excited about a renewed sense of urgency for Black lives. But theres bitterness and grief, too, over silence and the delayed response to all the other George Floyds, Tamir Rices, Sandra Blands and Breonna Taylors that remain buried in the East Texas woods. Where were their protests? Their laws? Their memorials? Stories like these are the ones that continue to live on in the region, but there doesnt need to be the loss of a Black body to feel the tragedy of racism and the way it floats like a thick smog in the air, permeating everything.

A 2016 analysis by the Dallas Morning News found that over 90 percent of police officers in Lufkin and Nacogdoches were white, despite having a population that is majority Black and Hispanic. A 2013 ACLU report found that African Americans were more than twice as likely than whites to be arrested on marijuana charges in Texas, and two East Texas counties ranked in the nations top five for this racial disparity. And African Americans in East Texas have experienced the most pervasive poverty among Black people across the state, with a median income below $25,000, according to research from the The University of Texas at Austin. Recent COVID-19 cases have also ballooned in East Texas, as the pandemic disproportionately impacts Black and Brown communities across the nation and rural areas scramble for adequate testing and resources.

The protests today signal a shift in the status quo, but theres still a need for sweeping systemic change in a region that has been resistant to do so. I hope that marchers here and across the country will continue to say the name of George Floyd, without forgetting to say the names of James Byrd Jr., Henry Smith, and countless other victims lost to hatred and bigotry. I hope that this moment leads to the end of a system that has long stolen our freedom and our ability to breathe, and to a sustained movementone that, this time, doesnt pass East Texas by.

Once, when I was about 8 years old, I sat with my cousin in the back seat of my aunts car as she drove us through Splendora, 40 miles northeast of Houston. We passed a group of men draped in white sheets parading on the side of the road, and we pointed excitedly out the window at what we thought were ghost costumes for an early Halloween. My aunt told us to close our eyes and put our heads down, as she gripped the wheel and continued to drive.

Those figures continue to haunt my home. I see now its time we pull over and face them.

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What the Black Lives Matter Protests Mean for East Texas - The Texas Observer

By Kristina Garcia and Kim Pham | 16 hours ago

Today, Orange County residents are celebrating Juneteenth.

Sometimes called Emancipation Day or Americas second independence day, Juneteenth is recognized as a holiday or day of observance in 48 states and the District of Columbia.

Juneteenth is especially resonant this year as Black Lives Matter protests continue in communities throughout the country.

Given Orange Countys traditionally strained relationship with Black residents and a long history of KKK chapters throughout the county, the BLM protests have special import here as they place a new generation of Black residents on center stage to focus on issues of police budgeting and use of force like never before.

But what is Juneteenth exactly?

On Jan. 1, 1863, Abraham Lincoln formally issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing all enslaved people from the Confederate states and declaring their freedom in America now and forever. However, issuing the document wasnt an immediate fix.

In 1863, news traveled slowly across the United States. And it wasnt uncommon for slaveholders to withhold this information from enslaved people until the end of harvest. Texas, the westernmost slave-owning state, was among the last to receive word of the proclamation.

On June 19, 1865, Gordon Granger, a Union Army general, finally arrived in Galveston, Texas where he issued the order from the president of the United States. He not only announced the end of the Civil War but revealed that enslaved people were to be freed.

Image courtesy of the Texas State Library and Archives Commission

General Orders, No. 3. U.S. House, 54th Congress, 1st Session (H. Doc. 369, Part 2). General Order Number 3, 1896. U.S. Documents Collection. Y 1.1/2: SERIAL 3437

Although Gen. Grangers orders didnt immediately free them, they did spark celebration for newly freed Black people, and since then June 19, or Juneteenth, has been marked as the day of commemoration for the end of slavery.

Justice Crudup, a Black Lives Matter activist based in Anaheim, said he believes that June 19 should be recognized as a national holiday for many reasons.

I think a lot of American culture has engulfed and promoted Black culture without actually pledging allegiance to Black intellect and Black heritage, Crudup said.

The recent protests across the nation, sparked by the death of George Floyd, have come to represent a momentous event in civil rights history. They are reminiscent not only of the 1960s civil rights movement, but also of the uprisings in the 1800s which led to the Emancipation Proclamation.

Crudup and his family started celebrating Juneteenth on the 13th, and will continue their celebrations throughout the weekend a common custom. He said that while the 19th was the big hammer on the nail, with Lincolns signing of the executive order, it is important to remember and acknowledge the significance of the fights and the activism that took place to make it happen.

There were many other factors, many other big events that led up to Juneteenth in history. There were a lot of slave rebellions, a lot of marches, there were a lot of civil rights movements that led to the Emancipation Proclamation, Crudup said.

Even though in-person celebrations and gatherings have been cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic, people can commemorate Juneteenth by educating themselves and those around them.

Visit theThe Smithsonians National Museum of African American History and Culture. All day on Friday, June 19 and Saturday, June 20, 2020, they will host an online celebration where they (bring) the Museum to you through presentations, stories, photographs, and recipes from the Sweet Home Caf.

Check out Observing Juneteenth in 2020 , a story recently posted by PBS. It includes informative videos about this day.

Engage with the black community in Orange County and learn more about black history by visiting the websites of these Orange County based organizations:

I think what Americans should be doing is not only watching your standard documentary about Black history but engaging in conversations with individuals who may not understand the full scope of Black history and how it has basically been destroyed within the American curriculum, Crudup said.

Crudup said that Americans look at slavery, Jim Crow laws, and Martin Luther King Jr., and think that is Black history. But there are many more people and events that they should familiarize themselves with to broaden their perspectives.

Despite recurring proposals across multiple administrations to recognize Juneteenth as a national holiday, the issue is still the subject of debate. Crudup said that Americans should be questioning this unacceptable status quo.

I think Americans should want to question it. Why is Juneteenth not a national holiday? I mean, who is preventing it? Why has it been such a hard thing to swallow in the past? Crudup said.

If people dont know where weve been, then we arent looking at our history, then how the heck are we going to know where to go for progress?

For people who are looking to gather from a safe distance, the Orange County affliate of Susan G. Komen will be hosting a virtual Juneteenth on June 19 from 6 to 7 p.m on Facebook and YouTube Live.

Susan G. Komen partnered with the OC branch of the National Coalition of 100 Black Women and the OC Heritage Council to help bring on Dr. Veronica Jones M.D. from City of Hope and Letitia Clark, Tustin mayor pro tem, for a question-and-answer panel which will will dive into discussions about breast health disparities among the Black community and other relevant topics.

Black Lives Matter protesters are embodying the spirit of the holiday by continuing their activism through the Juneteenth weekend. Individuals can attend one of five protests coming up at the end of this week in Buena Park, Irvine, Seal Beach, Newport Beach and Santa Ana.Most of these protests encourage the use of face masks and social distancing to adhere to COVID-19 safety measures.

Below is a chart of all protests in Orange County and their specific times:

Kristina Garcia is an intern for Voice of OC Arts & Culture. She can be reached at kristinamgarcia6@gmail.com.

Kim Pham is an intern for Voice of OC Arts & Culture. She can be reached at kimhphm@gmail.com.

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Celebrating Juneteenth in the Midst of the Black Lives Matter Movement - Voice of OC