Monthly Archives: June 2020

On the Issue of Slavery in New York State

By Don Rittner

The recent decision by Albany Mayor Kathy Sheehan on unilaterally decidinig to bring down the Philip Schuyler statue because he had slaves shows the ignorance that most local politicians have on the issue of Slavery.

While all agree that slavery was legal, accepted, and being practiced for thousands of years, there was an epiphany by many of the early New York State forefathers that slavery should be abolished. It was not an easy thing to do, particularly in the Hudson Valley, which housed the largest number of slaves. Present day Albany and New York City have the dubious claim to fame to where it all began in the 17th century in our state.

New Yorkers like John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, George Clinton, James Duane, Daniel Tomkins, Philip Schuyler and others made it their business to try and end slavery through legal means and make amends for sins of the past. It was not easy considering at the time that Albany was settled by the Dutch and Philip Schuyler, who himself was from a wealthy and prestigious Dutch family, had to go against his own people to convince a still Dutch stronghold such as Albany that it needed to abolish a system that was always here. Many Albanians and landowners owned slaves for example:

Killian K Van Rensselaer, Patrick Clark, John Jac. Beeckman, Robert Yates, John W. Watkins, Francis Nicolle, Leonart Gansevoort, Thomas Lottridge, Nicholas Frats, Gilbert Jenkins, Renier I. Van Irveren, John Ten Broeck, James Caldwell, Abraham Ten Broeck (12 slaves), Pieter Schuyler, first mayor of Albany, and son Philip Schuyler (13 slaves, most of the hard work on his farm was done by white tenant farmers according to the Schuyler Mansion Web site), to name a few.

Between 1646-1820 there were 250 enslavers in Albany County with a total of 4,288 slaves. The total Capital District of Albany, Schenectady, and Troy had 250, 228, and 977 respectively for a total of 728 slaveholders with 6,345 slaves during this period. By 1820 there were 645 free blacks living in Albany.

Abolishing slavery in New York was an evolutionary process and the New York State law makers grappled with it by passing law after law. The best summary of this process was published in Documents of the Senate of the State of New York 124th Session in 1901. It included a State Library Bulletin History No. 4 written by ex -judge A. Judd Northrup.

Since there has been so much erroneous comments made about slavery in NYS on Facebook and elsewhere, and about particular people like Schuyler, here is the section verbatim on the legislative history of slavery in New York.

SLAVERY UNDER STATE GOVERNMENT FROM 1776 To 1827, AND SUPPLEMENTAL

When New York came to statehood in 1776 it had a population, as we have seen, of about 169,148 whites and 21,993 blacks, or the blacks constituted about 11 1/2% of the entire population. Up to this time there had been little legislation tending to mitigate the hardships of slavery, or indicating any relaxation of the old idea that slaves were to be regarded and treated solely as property. The colony of New York was no worse, and perhaps no better, in this respect than the other colonies.

The declaration of independence and the wide promulgation and general discussion of the doctrines of freedom and the rights of man, however, threw a new light on the subject. The self-evident truth that all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, though intended by its proclaimers to apply to white men only, was yet seed sown in many minds and hearts, where it grew into doubts at least of the rightfulness of negro slavery. Liberty and equality was a phrase that shook all Europe when shouted in revolutionary France; and it made men think beyond the old limitations of race lines when reechoed in America. The revolutionary fathers, Washington, Jefferson, Patrick Henry, Madison, and many others, voiced what was perhaps a not uncommon sentiment among the better and more intelligent classes at this time, in declaring slavery to be an evil and a wrong, and in expressing the hope and belief that it would speedily come to an end in the republic. If this sentiment prevailed to some extent in the southern states, where slaves were numerous and slavery profitable, as we know it did, it is reasonable to believe that, to an equal if not greater extent, it pervaded New York and the other northern states, where slaves were few in number and their employment was of little pecuniary value.

The exigencies of the war of the revolution were the cause of the first state legislation mentioning slaves. The war had dragged along for five years, and the drain on the scanty population to supply the needs of the army had been severe. There had never been an extreme reluctance to use free negroes as soldiers, and these had fought side by side with white men all through the war thus far; but it was a pressing need indeed that made the whites willing to employ slaves as soldiers. The emergency, however, was great, and Mar. 20, 1781 was passed An Act for raising two regiments for the Defense of this State, on Bounties of unappropriated Lands.

In the act was the following:

VI. And be it further enacted by the authority aforesaid, That any person who shall deliver one or more of his or her able bodied male slaves to any warrant officer as aforesaid, to serve in either of the said regiments or independent corps, and produce a certificate thereof, signed by any officer or person authorized to muster and receive the men, to be raised by virtue of this act, and produce such certificate to the surveyor general, shall, for every male slave so entered or mustered as aforesaid, be entitled to the location and grant of one right, [to 500 acres of bounty lands], in manner as in and by this act is directed; and shall be, and hereby is discharged from any future maintenance of such slave; any law to the contrary notwithstanding; and such slave, so entered as aforesaid, who shall serve for the term of three years, or until regularly discharged, shall, immediately after such service or discharge, be, and is hereby declared to be a free man of this state.

This was followed, soon after the war, by an act, passed May 12, 1784 entitled An Act for the speedy sale of the confiscated and forfeited Estates within this State, and for other Purposes therein mentioned, referring to estates forfeited to the state by attainder or conviction in the progress of the late war. It contained the following provision:

And be it enacted by the authority aforesaid, That the said commissioner or commissioners shall, out of any monies which may come into his or their hands for rents, make suitable provision for the support and maintenance of any slave or slaves who may be found unable to support themselves, and who belonged to, and have not been disposed of by any person or persons, whose respective estates have become confiscated or forfeited to the people of this state.

This act was so amended May 1, 1786 as to manumit all negro slaves become the property of the state, by the attainder or conviction of any person whomsoever, and in the possession of the commissioners of forfeitures, who were required to provide, at the expense of the state, for the comfortable subsistence of all old and feeble slaves unable to gain a subsistence, so forfeited in their respective districts.

An act, with the misleading title, An Act granting bounty on hemp to be raised within this state, etc. and for other purposes, was passed Ap. 12, 1785. It provided:

That if any negro or other person to be imported or brought into this state from any of the United States or from any other place or country after the first day of June next, shall be sold as a slave or slaves within this state, the seller or his or her factor or agent, shall be deemed guilty of a public offense, and shall for every such offense forfeit the sum of one hundred pounds lawful money of New York, to be recovered by any person who will sue for the same in an action of debt, in any court of this state having cognizance of the same, together with costs of suit. . . That every such person imported or brought into this state and sold contrary to the true intent and meaning of this act shall be freed.

Also,

That when any person or persons hereafter shall be disposed to manumit his, her or their slave or slaves, and shall previous thereto procure a certificate signed by the overseers of the poor (or the major part of them) of the town, manor, district or precinct, together with two justices of the peace of the county where such person or persons shall reside, and if in the counties of New York or Albany then from the mayor or recorder any two of the aldermen certifying that slave or slaves appear to be under fifty years of age, and of sufficient ability to provide for themselves, and shall cause such certificates of manumission to be registered in the office of the clerk of the town, manor, district or precinct, in which the master or mistress may reside, that then it shall be lawful for such person or persons to manumit such slave or slaves without giving or providing any security to indemnify the town, manor, district or precinct; and such slave or slaves so manumitted shall be deemed, taken and adjudged to be free; and the clerk for registering such certificate shall be entitled to two shillings and no more.

That if any person by his or her last will or testament shall give his or her slave or slaves, being at the death of the testator or testatrix under fifty years of age and likewise of sufficient ability to provide for themselves, to be certified in the manner aforesaid, such freedom given as aforesaid shall, without any security to indemnify the town, manor, district or precinct, be deemed, taken and adjudged to be good and valid to all intents and purposes, any law, usage or custom to the contrary notwithstanding.

That all negroes, and other persons of any description whatsoever commonly reputed and deemed slaves shall forever hereafter have the privilege of being tried by a jury in all capital cases according to the course of the common law.

An Act concerning slaves, passed Feb. 22, 1788, and being chapter 40 of the laws of that year, was a revision of the existing laws of the state relating to slaves. It was the first deliberate expression of the state legislature on the whole subject of slavery, and it may be taken as an exhibit of the temper of the people at that time on that subject. As such, it is worth reproducing, in substance at least. It enacted:

That every negro, mulatto, or mestee, within this state, who at the time of the passing of this act, is a slave, for his or her life, shall continue such, for and during his or her life, unless he or she, shall be manumitted or set free, in the manner prescribed in and by this act, or in some future law of this state.

That the children of every negro, mulatto or mestee woman, being a slave, shall follow the state and condition of the mother, and be esteemed, reputed, taken and adjudged slaves to all in tents and purposes whatsoever.

That the baptizing of any negro, or other slave, shall not be deemed, adjudged, or taken, to be a manumission of such slave.

It was further enacted that slaves should not be imported or those imported since June 1, 1785, sold as slaves, under a penalty of 100, to be sued for by action of debt, the person imported and sold to be free; that any person buying or receiving a slave with intent to remove such slave out of this state, to be sold, should foeit 100, and such slave be free.

It enacted prohibitions against concealing or harboring runaway slaves; against trafficking with slaves; against selling liquor to slaves; made owners of slaves liable to the persons damaged by thefts committed by slaves, to the amount of 5 or under: slaves to be committed to prison for striking a white person.

Slaves were to be entitled to jury trials in capital cases; slaves not to be witnesses in any case, except in criminal cases in which the evidence of one slave was to be admitted for or against an other slave.

Masters were forbidden to allow their slaves to go about begging. Pretended sales of aged or decrepit slaves to persons unable to keep and maintain them forbidden, and such sales declared void. Manumission of slaves regulated, to same effect as in laws of 1785, ch. 68 (given above, passed Ap. 12, 1785).

To those provisions were added in this act the following:

That if the owner or owners of any other slave, shall be disposed, to manumit and set at liberty, such slave, and such owner or owners, or any other sufficient person, for, or in behalf of such slave, shall and do, at the court of general sessions of the peace, for the city or county, where such negro or other slave shall dwell or reside, enter into a bond, to the people of the state of New York, with one or more surety or sureties, to be approved by such court, in sum, not less than two hundred pounds, to keep any slave from becoming or being any charge to the city, town or place within this state, wherein such slave shall at any time, after such manumission, live, the said slave shall be free, according to such manumission of the owner or owners of such slave.

And further, if any such slave hath been or hereafter shall be made free, by the last will and testament of any person deceased, and if the executor or executors of such person so deceased, or in case of the neglect or refusal of such executor or executors, if any other sufficient person, for, and in behalf of such slave, shall and do, enter into such surety as aforesaid, in manner aforesaid, then the said slave shall be free, according to the true intent and meaning of such last will and testament.

And moreover, that if any person shall, by last will or otherwise, manumit or set free, his or her slave, and no such certificate or security as aforesaid be given or obtained, such slave shall nevertheless, be considered as free from such owner, his or her executor, administrator and assigns. But such owner, his and her heirs, executors and administrators, shall remain and be liable to support and maintain such slave, if the same slave shall become unable to support and maintain himself or herself.

The law relating to manumission thus became, in substance:

1 Slaves under 50 years of age and able to support and maintain themselves, and so certified by the proper officers, might be manumitted by will or otherwise, without security being given for their future support in case they should become unable to support themselves. The master was thus freed from all farther liability on their account.

2 Any other slave, whatever his age or condition or ability, might be manumitted by will or otherwise, and become free on a bond being given for his support in case of his becoming unable to support himself.

3 If any person, by will or otherwise, manumitted a slave, and no certificate or security was given, the slave nevertheless be came free; but the owner, executors and heirs were liable for the support of the slave if he became unable to support himself.

On the subject of manumission, compare the colonial act of Dec. 10, 1712; Gov. Hunters letter to the Lords of trade, Nov. 12, 1715; the act of Nov. 2, 1717 (the result of Gov. Hunters letter) and the act of Oct. 29, 1730.

Chapter 28, laws of 1790, passed Mar. 22, 1790, An Act to amend the act entitled An Act concerning slaves, provided that slaves convicted of crime under the degree of a capital offense might be transported by the master or mistress out of the state, on the certificate of the court trying the offender, that transportation would be a proper punishment; also allowed appeals to the court of general sessions from the refusal of overseers of the poor to grant certificates for manumission of slaves appearing to be under 50 years of age and of sufficient ability to provide for themselves.

Chapter 17, laws of 1792, authorized the state treasurer to reimburse towns supporting slaves manumitted by the state on the confiscation of the estates of their owners; provided they were supported as other poor persons were.

The Quakers were among the earliest opponents They, however, sometimes owned slaves, but in many instances manumitted them, often without regard to the requisite formalities. The legislature by an act passed Mar. 9, 1798, confirmed such manumissions.

Efforts were made by the prominent statesmen of New York, soon after the formation of the state, to secure the abolition of slavery. The following, from Bancroft, reveals the feeling of the wiser men of that generation:

In the constituent convention of New York, Gouverneur Morris struggled hard for measures tending to abolish domestic slavery, so that in future ages every human being who breathed the air of the state might enjoy the privileges of a freeman. The proposition, though strongly supported, especially by the interior and newer counties, was lost by the vote of the counties on the Hudson. Jay lamented the want of a clause against the continuance of domestic slavery. Still, the declaration of independence was incorporated into the constitution of New York; and all its great statesmen were opposed to slavery. All parts of the common law, and all statutes and acts repugnant to the constitution, were abrogated and repealed by the constitution itself.

The New England states and Pennsylvania moved more promptly and effectually in applying the principles of the declaration of independence, the logical outcome of which was the abolition of slavery. New Jersey lagged behind. Even in the southern states there was a strong feeling in favor of some plan for the gradual removal of slavery, which, doubtless, would have culminated in legislative action but for the sudden and disastrous increase in the value of slave labor.

Finally, however, Mar. 29, 1799, New York passed its first great act (laws of 1799, ch. 62) for the gradual abolition of slavery. It enacted:

That any child born of a slave within this state after the fourth day of July next, shall be deemed and adjudged to be born free: Provided nevertheless that such child shall be the servant of the legal proprietor of his or her mother, until such servant if a male shall arrive at the age of twenty-eight years, and if a female at the age of twenty-five years.

That the master of the mother shall be entitled to the services of such child.

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On the Issue of Slavery in New York State - Albany Times Union

Great Britain has done much for the world but sadly its links with slavery cannot be ignored. The Black Lives Matter movement is shining a bright light on this chapter in the country's history - the toppling of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol is arguably the most memorable image of 2020 so far.

But what of Yorkshire's connections to slavery?

British merchants were among the largest participants in the Atlantic slave trade that saw Africans forcibly sent to work in the Caribbean. A campaign for the abolition of slavery, led most notably by Yorkshireman William Wilberforce, saw the Slave Trade Act enacted in 1807, effectively banning the practice.

Wilberforce, who was from the Hull area, became an MP for the county and the leading force in a 20-year-long campaign to get slavery abolished.

But despite the steps taken to get rid of slavery, the lasting legacy of slavery can still be seen stamped up and down the country - even though you might not have realised it until the Black Lives Matters protests began.

Yorkshire is no exception with a large number of historic buildings and country estates paid for by noblemen and women with ties to plantation profits harvested by slaves.

While we cannot re-write history, experts from the University College London have created a database that shows the mark left by former slave-owners on the physical fabric of Britain was "considerable".

It reveals a list of prominent buildings and monuments that were built by, dedicated to or developed by people who owned slaves or inherited money from slave owners.

There are many ways of keeping up-to-date with everything happening across Yorkshire as our journalists work day and night to bring you the very latest news.

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Below is a list of some of the prominent buildings in Yorkshire that have links to the slave trade:

Harewood Housenear Leeds

Records show that Henry Lascelles, the Earl of Harewood, made his fortune from the slave trade. The Lascelles family who own Harewood House had interests in 47 sugar plantations and owned thousands of slaves in Barbados and across the West Indies. They werent unique most merchants of the period were involved in the slave trade. Chair of its trustees David Lascelles issued a statement in response to the Black Lives Matter movement and Harewoods connections to slavery.

Shibden Hall, Halifax

Most famous as home for the lesbian diarist Anne Lister, Shibden Hall later became home to Louisa Ann Grant, wife of John Lister who inherited the hall from Anne Lister. Louisa's father Major Charles Grant was involved with the Adelphi estate on St Vincent where 485 were enslaved.

Duncombe Park, Helmsley

Now a tourist attraction and wedding venue, it was owned by Charles Duncombe, a Conservative MP from 1790 to 1826. He was associated with the Morning Star Estate on the island of Nevis where 111 were enslaved.

Scruton Hall, Bedale

Its owner in the early 18th century was Foster Lechmere Coore, who came from a family of merchants in Liverpool. After attending Eton and Cambridge he and his brother Frederick were involved with the sugar plantation at St James, Jamaica, were 293 slaves were held.

Hellaby Hall, Rotherham

Now an upmarket hotel, it was once the home of Quaker sugar merchant and slave owner Ralph Fretwell. He returned from Barbados to Rotherham circa 1690 to build Hellaby Hall, which at one time was owned by the Eden family, whose descendant Anthony Eden went on to be Prime Minister in 1955.

Thirkleby Park, North Yorkshire

The records show owner Sir William Payne Gallwey was a British Army officer and slave owner. 137 were enslaved at the Pond and Fancy Estates on St Kitts where Thirkleby Park owner Sir William had an interest. He was a Deputy Lieutenant and J.P. for the North Riding of Yorkshire. The Payne family were wealthy West India planters. Thirkleby Hall was demolished in 1927 and the site is now used as a holiday caravan park.

The Mount Royale Hotel, York

Owned by attorney and slave owner George Kirlew. Kirlew was linked to nine estates in Jamaica, with approximately 300 people enslaved across the island. Kirlew was living at the Mount, York in 1841, ironically with his wife Ann Bruce of mixed heritage who was born in Jamaica.

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Seven historic Yorkshire buildings with links to the slave trade - Yorkshire Live

Pictured: the 2018 Berkeley Juneteenth Festival. This year, Juneteenth falls on Friday, June 19, but a live event wont happen because of the coronavirus pandemic. Photo: Nancy Rubin

In early May, the organizers of the Berkeley Juneteenth Festival which was set to happen this coming Sunday made the difficult decision to call off the hugely popular event amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. KQED reported Thursday that the annual gathering has been reimagined as an online commemoration, including daily posts on the Juneteenth Facebook page to spark conversations and reflection.

Last year, Berkeleyside contributor Aaron Welch wanted to find out how the Berkeley Juneteenth Festival, which began in 1986, came to be. The event, which celebrates the abolition of slavery in the United States, is believed to be one of the longest running Juneteenth celebrations in Northern California. This year, Juneteenth falls on Friday, June 19.

This week, Delores Nochi Cooper, who has organized the Berkeley Juneteenth Festival for 33 years, told KQED she has planned this years Juneteenth as a virtual event entitled No Justice, No Emancipation.' It will take the form of an online commentary with writings from writers and artists about the pandemic, civil unrest and the current status of Black lives.' Learn more on the Juneteenth Facebook page.

Today, to commemorate the occasion, Berkeleyside is republishing Welchs interview with Cooper. The interview has been updated and lightly edited for republication.

Juneteenth started in Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865. It was the final execution of the Emancipation Proclamation. When the formerly enslaved folks in Galveston heard they were finally free (more than two years after President Lincoln issued the executive order), they flooded the streets and rejoiced.

This celebration has become a tradition for African American communities in the South, as well as for African Americans who migrated to other parts of the United States.

About 30 years ago, the Adeline-Alcatraz Merchants Association was organized to promote small businesses in South Berkeley. They started Juneteenth to highlight the Adeline Corridor and to promote community pride and cooperation. We celebrated our first annual Juneteenth festival in 1986. In 1987, the nonprofit (Berkeley Juneteenth Cultural Celebrations) was established.

Juneteenth is a cultural event, kind of like Chinese New Year or Cinco de Mayo, where we celebrate our diversity. It unifies us as a community when we come to celebrate. But its also come to mean other things. The opportunity to celebrate the music, the culture and the traditions (of African Americans), has given us the opportunity to expand (Juneteenth) by allowing us to highlight the contributions that African Americans have made to the fabric of America as a whole. So it has evolved in that we want to educate and involve the community at large in our history, and welcome the community to come and participate along with us.

The other transition that weve gone through is that we offer economic opportunities through our vending, which has grown. We have about 150 African American vendors, who primarily feature ethnic wares.

Martin Luther King Jr. Way was a kind of Mason-Dixon line (for Berkeley), and most of the activity and the residence that occurred in the Black community was in South Berkeley. It was the center of African American jobs, businesses, etc. in the 1950s and 60s. South Berkeley is where African Americans migrated from the South to work in the shipyards, etc. in Richmond.

Also, at the time that the Japanese were interned and lost their homes in South Berkeley, some of those homes were taken over by Blacks. So that was the first opportunity that Black people had to own property in Berkeley, but it was at the expense of the Japanese people who lived in that area before. So its quite a history.

No. South Berkeley has changed tremendously. African Americans are down to about 8% of the Berkeley population. (Census figures show that in 1970, African Americans represented 23.5% of the Berkeley population.) Our population has dwindled down, certainly in South Berkeley. A lot of folks, after their parents passed away, sold their properties and moved to other parts of the Bay Area, like Oakland, where the rent was cheaper.

In our 33 years of existence, our consistent theme has been celebrating the African American experience and using the organization as a vehicle to demonstrate that the community is a part of and not outside of the societys mainstream. We do this by featuring and celebrating our culture and our music, and by providing new and upcoming talent with the opportunity to perform professionally.

A lot of people dont know it, but H.E.R. (the R&B musical artist) performed on our stage as an 11-year-old. Fast forward 10 years, shes now a Grammy Award-winning singer. We really take that seriously. I think its really important to provide an avenue for up-and-coming talent to perform professionally on a stage like ours.

Another part of our tradition is celebrating and acknowledging the Black history-makers in South Berkeley, like William Byron Rumford (thefirst African Americanelected to a state public office in Northern California), Henry Ramsey Jr. (alawyer and Alameda County Superior Court judgewho advocated on behalf of African American communities), Frances Albrier (a civil rights activist who became thefirst African American womanto be hired at Richmond Shipyard No. 2, among other achievements), and Mable Howard (who organized the community against BARTs original plan to runabove ground in South Berkeley, which would have divided the predominantly African American neighborhood from the rest of the city). All those individuals have historical markers that identify them as history-makers in South Berkeley in the 1950s and 60s.

We utilize local Black visual artists in the creation of all of our images. Those images are displayed around the community, including our banners on the festival corridor between Alcatraz Avenue and Woolsey Street, which were created by a local South Berkeley artist by the name of Mildred Howard.

We acknowledge that our community has indeed come a mighty long way and therein lies our strength. We also acknowledge that theres a continual fight for equal justice under the law, and we support that and hope that our program emphasizes that with our themes, what we talk about on the stage, and (through) the other organizations that (Berkeley Juneteenth Cultural Celebrations) is involved with.

I think its really important that we invite the community at large. We want other groups to feel welcome to come and acknowledge and celebrate along with us, and celebrate us for one day and we call it Juneteenth Day.

Connect with the Berkeley Juneteenth Festival on its website and Facebook page.

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Berkeley's Juneteenth Festival began in 1986; this year it has gone online - Berkeleyside

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Since the casual killing of George Floyd on camera, unprecedented protests not policy papers have radically shifted public opinion in support of the battle against systemic racism. The new nation being born in our streets may yet blossom into Langston Hughess land that never has been yet / and yet must be but only if this movement refuses to let its truths be marched into the narrow cul-de-sac of police reform.

Yes, years of police killings of unarmed African-Americans had stacked up like dry tinder. True, George Floyds public murder furnished the spark. But freedoms forge must finish its work while the coals are hot. This is the hour to reimagine what America could become if We the People meant all of us. America needs what this movement intends to do: change history, after which police training manuals will follow.

We have witnessed a multicolored and intergenerational uprising whose power grows more poised and peaceful by the day, winning support that reveals a newly mobilized majority in our midst. Let no one mistake peace for quiet, however, nor mistake the rage over police violence as ignoring the roots of policy violence and poverty violence. The ruthless indifference of our governments to the poor was clear well before Covid-19 laid it bare.

Cries of I cant breathe call out in compelling shorthand Americas enduring racial chasm in every measure of well-being: health care and infant mortality, wages and wealth, unemployment, education, housing, policing and criminal justice, water quality and environmental safety. The bills that bustle through our legislatures offer narrow reforms of police procedures and bypass the fullness of what the protesters are saying: The children of privilege are protected not by a higher grade of policing but by deeper layers of resources and that is what ought to protect all of our children.

That so many Indigenous nations have joined the protests should surprise no one. The challenges that confront African-Americans are endemic to these peoples as well. Their unique, continuing struggle to exercise their sovereignty against a continuing conquest reminds us of how deep and various are our struggles against white supremacy. Their own modern Selma water cannons used on peaceful protesters on a 23-degree winter night happened near the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in November 2016.

The marching feet say what the Congress cannot yet hear: Our national history and character carved these scars into our body politic. Policy tinkering will not heal them. If we are to understand the pressing need for radical reconstruction of our nation in this moment, we must look back to see how 400 years of compromises with white supremacy brought us to this place. The American Revolutions dreams deferred now call us to a brighter common future.

To hear that call, we might turn to Monticello, where an enslaved woman fetched future-President Thomas Jefferson the lamp by which he framed Gods unalienable human rights, and to Constitution Hall, where the founders secured the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity by compromising with racial tyranny.

It is crucial to remember that many patriots of that Revolution found slavery incompatible with its meaning. Mr. Jeffersons 1774 A Summary of the Rights of British America claimed, The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies. That he wrote this while holding a deed to a baby girl who would one day bear him six children only marks the human paradox of chattel slavery in a democratic republic.

At the Constitutional Convention, Southern delegates required that the document bow to slavery. Fearful of the Norths larger electorate, the planters nixed direct national elections and created the Electoral College to constrain the popular will. They demanded their property in dark flesh be counted as three-fifths of a person for purposes of white representation in Congress. Such measures gave the Southern planters power beyond their numbers; for 32 of our first 36 years, presidents hailed from Virginia and enslaved other Americans.

Jefferson knew America had gained a nation at great cost to its soul. Slavery, he predicted, was the speck in our horizon which is to burst on us as a tornado, sooner or later. That tornado roared in 1861 as the nation plunged into Civil War. Nearly 200,000 black soldiers battled for the Union. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant reported that their valor constituted the heaviest blow yet to the Confederacy. After the victory, African-American families gathered in Freedmens Conventions across the South. These men and women sought schools for their children, protection from Ku Klux Klan terror and full citizenship.

The interracial Reconstruction governments created the Souths first public schools and eased restrictions on voting for poor whites as well as freed people. Black citizenship so offended Southern conservatives, however, that by the mid-1870s they turned to unspeakable violence to crush all dreams of a nonracial We the People. Between Emancipation and the turn of the 20th century, interracial fusion political alliances, mostly between poor farmers, black and white, emerged in states of the former Confederacy. Most were surprisingly robust and persistent. In three states of the Upper South, Tennessee, North Carolina and Virginia, these fusion movements actually took state power. These hopeful democratic experiments ended by blood, not ballots. Tyrants dubbing themselves Redeemers stole We the People from us and built the Jim Crow South on white supremacy, ending hopes for democracy until the 1960s.

Even now, the ancient lie of white supremacy remains lethal. It has left millions of African-American children impoverished in resegregated and deindustrialized cities. It embraces high-poverty, racially isolated schools that imperil our children and our future. It shoots first and dodges questions later. Not everything that is faced can be changed, James Baldwin instructs, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

Change requires an honest confrontation with our history and what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called the strength to love. These new American revolutionaries speak their love and strength in language less about right and left than right and wrong. They demand a genuine democracy and are skeptical of democratic braying from a Congress that watched the U.S. Supreme Court wipe its feet on the Voting Rights Act. Nobody in these protests intends to accept a democracy that consistently fails to ensure that all Americans, including people of color, women, immigrants, the elderly and students, have easy and equal access to the ballot. They consider it common sense that democracy will not survive without high-quality, well-funded and diverse schools.

What Dorothy Day called a revolution of the heart is blossoming in our streets, where the revolutionaries seem confident that America can spend less on endless war and the police state, make the 1 percent and the corporations pay a fair share and be able to ensure health care, living wages and affordable housing for all. All demand that our legacy must include a livable planet. Black and white, immigrant and Indigenous, Asian-American and Latinx, straight and L.G.B.T.Q., of every hue and faith, they make it plain: These things will require not mere policy tinkering but dismantling the interlocking systems created by and for white supremacy and gender-based oppressions.

Their stunning faith in the possibilities of American democracy will be their gift to both our ancestors and our descendants. And they are inspiring a nation to summon once more the courage to change history. America never was America to me, Mr. Hughes writes. And yet I swear this oath: America will be!

William Barber II and Liz Theoharis are co-chairs of the Poor Peoples Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. Timothy B. Tyson is a senior research scholar at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. Cornel West is professor of the practice of public philosophy at Harvard University. The Poor Peoples Campaign is mobilizing a coalition of national and grass-roots justice organizations for change on June 20.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. Wed like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And heres our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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Racism Can Be Defeated by a Revolution of the Heart - The New York Times

This is the power of the contemporary anti-racist movement: the mainstream media in the US is seriously discussing how and why the police might be abolished. Democrats are being booed and chased from rallies if they wont agree to it. A YouGov poll from mid-June found 44 percent of Americans to be in favour of cutting police budgets and reallocating the money to social welfare, while 27 percent supported the slogan defund the police.

A wide-ranging debate has broken out about what police abolition means, whether its possible, and how it might be acheived. At the heart of the debate are three verbs: reform, defund and abolish. Which should happen to the police? Does abolish really mean abolish, or is it the same as defund? Are defunding and abolition just different ways of saying reform?

Reform the usual go-to when the police have been caught murdering someone for now appears discredited. As Alex S. Vitale points out in his prescient 2017 book The End of Policing, the USs murderous militarised police are the product of decades of reform. The better training, diversification and community policing that have tended to constitute these reform efforts have led mainly to police departments having more money, better weapons, more effective PR, and a deeper implantation in the neighbourhoods where they brutalise people and kill with impunity.

Around the peak of the first incarnation of Black Lives Matter five years ago, [t]he Minneapolis police implemented trainings on implicit bias, mindfulness, de-escalation, and crisis intervention; diversified the departments leadership; created tighter use-of-force standards; adopted body cameras; initiated a series of police-community dialogues, Vitale writes in the Guardian. But none of it worked, and now the police department there is widely recognised as so institutionally rotten that in a display of desperation the Democratic-led city council recently pledged to dismantle it.

The developing consensus in progressive opinion including not only the far left, but many reformists and even a lot of the centrist liberal intelligentsia is that reform is not enough. Reform has meant little more than making the police a more effective and acceptable instrument of repressive state power. Increasingly, it is that repressive power itself which is seen as the problem. Thats the significance of the growing support for police abolition.

The concept of abolition wasnt invented in 2020. Use of the term in relation to the criminal justice system mostly concerning prisons was spearheaded by activists like Ruth Wilson Gilmore (author of Golden Gulag), Mariame Kaba, and Angela Davis. What I love about abolition ... is the idea that you imagine a world without prisons, and then you work to try to build that world, James Forman Jr., author of Locking Up Our Own, told the New York Times in 2019. But the mass movement that emerged this year has made the slogan mainstream, and it is now applied to police as well as prisons.

This is an important development. For decades, police have been gaining in prestige and firepower in the US. Polls have shown entrenched trust and respect for the police (with unsurprising variations depending on race) at the same time as faith in politicians, the media, big business and trade unions has declined. Cops have been given military-grade weapons and armoured cars and its routine for them to pepper spray and tear gas peaceful protests. Governments and parliaments everywhere are keen to give police more powers to snoop and pry. The enormous movement in the US has, in two short weeks, started to reverse that process.

The concept of police abolition isnt limited to scrapping police departments. It also means winding back the criminalisation of poverty and mental illness that results in so many poor people, and so many Black people, being forced into contact with the police contact that leads to fines, imprisonment, violence and, too often, death. You might say its about abolishing the policeability of the inequality that prevails in capitalist societies. Its an argument that the expansion of the power of the police has gone hand-in-hand with the stagnation of wages, the loss of secure jobs and decent housing for workers, and the collapse of social welfare. "We dont want to just close police departments," writes Mariame Kaba in the New York Times. "We want to make them obsolete. We should redirect the billions that now go to police departments toward providing health care, housing, education and good jobs. If we did this, there would be less need for the police in the first place."

These emerging debates are therefore not just about brutal state repression, but the conditions that create it: systematic racial discrimination and growing economic inequality. In a sense, this movement is picking up where the anti-racist movements of the 1960s left off: with the recognition that the extreme economic inequality of US capitalism is inextricably linked to the racism and violence that permeates its social life. The movement has created profound ideological upheaval at every level.

The first target was the racist violence of the police and the state bureaucracies that defend them when they kill. Now, instances of police brutality against Black people, but not only are suddenly being met with rapid suspensions and charges against the perpetrators, while demoralised pigs resign en masse. Floridas SWAT team and the riot-control squad of Buffalo, New York, have basically abolished themselves, with their officers quitting because they cant handle being held even partially accountable for their thuggish behaviour.

But the movement has also challenged the unreckoned-with legacy of slavery, segregation, colonialism, and imperialism, a legacy which pervades almost every social institution. It is symbolically expressed in the statues of notorious white supremacists, many of which were erected during the Jim Crow era to demonstrate the local capitalists resentment at the end of slavery and intention to keep doing what they could to disenfranchise Black people. The movements broad horizons were displayed in the early decision of protesters to target the White House a building not usually associated with the concept of policing, but more an emblem of the entire US political and social system.

And now the campaign to defund or abolish the police, although it seems at first to focus narrowly on the question of repressive state power, actually raises much broader economic and social questions. For those who worry that the movement against racism is doomed to be co-opted into liberal posturing and virtue signalling, this is a sign of a very healthy dynamic towards a confrontation with the deep structures of economic and social inequality.

But the slogans of defunding and abolishing themselves contain tricky nuances and complexities. Theres now a cottage industry of articles in mainstream newspapers with titles like: What would efforts to defund or disband police departments really mean?

Theres not always a clear differentiation between the notions of defunding and abolition. Consider the dialogue at the now celebrated failure by Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey to ingratiate himself with protesters:

Protest leader: Yes or no, will you defund the Minneapolis Police Department? Be quiet yall, its important that we actually hear this, because if yall don't know, hes up for re-election next year... and if he says no, guess what the fuck we're gonna do next year?

Frey: I do not support the full abolition of the police department.

Protester: All right, then get the fuck out of here.

At that admission from Frey, the crowd exploded into a roar of disapproval, chanting Go home, Jacob, go home. Clearly, both Frey and the protesters considered defunding and abolishing to be pretty much the same thing.

More mainstream liberal voices have published reassuring articles that argue police abolition is really just a different way of saying reform. A long-simmering movement for police abolition has become part of the national conversation, recast slightly as a call to defund the police, wrote Christy Lopez, director of Georgetown Law Schools Innovative Policing Program, in the Washington Post, Be not afraid. Defunding the police is not as scary (or even as radical) as it sounds.

On the other side, theres Mariame Kabas article in the New York Times: Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish The Police. Kaba is a Black prison abolition activist. Her article is one of the most left wing articulations of the abolitionist position. It puts a heavy emphasis on fighting against economic and social inequality. But even that piece quotes, with apparent approval, Tracy Meares, of the authors of Obamas post-Ferguson Task Force on 21st Century Policing: policing as we know it must be abolished before it can be transformed (emphasis added). Elsewhere, Kaba has, in her own words, described the meaning of prison abolition: complete and utter dismantling of prison and policing and surveillance as they currently exist (again, emphasis added).

Phrases like as we know it or as they currently exist tend to make their way into a lot of articles about abolition. Thats when the conceptual lines between abolishing, defunding, and reforming the police can get a little blurred.

Ambiguity around the term abolition sometimes makes it possible for the liberal establishment Democrats to champion the concept. The measure of success is much vaguer than that of more clear-cut demands like disarming police or cutting their budgets. You know when police have been defunded, and you know when theyve been disarmed. But its surprisingly hard to tell when theyve been abolished. The whole world is watching. We can declare policing as we know it a thing of the past, wrote Steve Fletcher, one of the Democrats who dominate the Minneapolis city council. But the much vaunted council-approved dismantling of the police in Minneapolis has turned out in practice to be a year-long feasibility study into various kinds of police reform.

Camden, New Jersey, has been held up as a model of a city that supposedly dismantled its police department. But its police chief marched at the head of the recent protests. How can a city that dismantled its police department still have a police chief? Because having dismantled the city police as part of a statewide austerity program, not the mayors sudden conversion to anarchism Camden reconstructed a new, very well-funded police force under the authority of the county government, with lots of standard community policing reforms. The newly hired officers were instructed to knock on doors and patrol streets, get to know the community, host basketball games and barbecues. This stuff isnt abolition in any meaningful sense: its a neighbourhood panopticon, involving a lot of theexpensive rebranding efforts now being derided as mere reform. And yet Camden is upheld as an abolitionist model: the city that really did abolish its police.

Behind the ambiguity of some of the slogans, the reality is relatively straightforward. Cops are cops everywhere: a brutal, racist clique of gangsters who can intimidate at will and which the authorities depend on to maintain capitalist order and protect their power. As long as capitalism exists, the police will not be abolished. A society based on inequality and exploitation needs violence and repression to keep the oppressed in line. Cities like Camden might abolish the police as we know it, but theyll only return in a rebranded form maybe with a little less of the overt sadism, but still a violent, discriminatory, and repressive force presenting itself as the defender of safety and order.

To really abolish the police would mean allowing workers to deal with problems in our communities as we see fit, without armed agents representing our rulers intervening. That would require a lot more than cutting cop budgets and redistributing wealth. The working class would have to be organised and empowered to settle disputes collectively. Such a situation would be completely incompatible with capitalism, where the unchallenged rule of capitalists in the workplace and cops in the street requires workers to exist as passive, isolated individuals. Cities and towns in which the working class run their own affairs, and the capitalist state is powerless to intercede, are cities and towns in which the political rule of the capitalist class has been overthrown.

To try to create a simulation of that while capitalism still exists is to fall into the mirage of community policing. The real end of the police will come when the working class can collectively organise a society based on satisfying human needs, rather than a society organised by the power of an exploiting class and the domination of a bureaucratic state.

Cops should be defunded, with the cuts as deep and far-reaching as possible. They should be disarmed not just of their military-grade weapons, but of their sidearms they use to settle disputes. They should be treated with scorn and seen as enemies. Poverty shouldnt be criminalised, and the poor should have access to decent welfare and employment: that should be funded not just by ripping money from police department budgets, but by attacking the accumulated wealth of the capitalists whose system the police defend. These would be positive developments in their own right, and they might, if you squint your eyes, look like the abolition of the police as we know them. But the police would still be there, temporarily weakened and on the defensive perhaps, but ready to step in where needed to protect the status quo.

Activists have to keep fighting to make prisons and police as irrelevant as possible while also fighting for the dignity and wellbeing of the oppressed.

But to really create a world without police and prisons without a force dedicated to upholding the fundamental inequalities of a society built on exploitation it wont be enough to just cut their budgets or take away their most powerful guns. Nor is it enough to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor. We have to create a society that isnt divided into a ruling class, which owns property and gives orders, and the working class, which must be policed and intimidated so that it better submits to conditions of exploitation.

The militarisation and racism of the police are symptoms of a society based on fundamental principles of inequality and oppression. We cant defund the capitalist state to death: well have to overthrow it in a revolution and reconstruct a society based on collective cooperation, to make unnecessary the gang violence that today we call law enforcement.

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Defunding, disarming, defeating and abolishing the police - Red Flag

Following recent weeks of racial justice protests and discussions, SAG-AFTRA, all of Hollywood's major agencies and several PR firms have announced Juneteenth will be a paid company holiday this year and going forward. Juneteenth marks the day, on June 19, 1865, when Union soldiers arrived in Texas to announce the Civil War had ended and all slaves were now free, thereby ending slavery in the U.S. two and half years after Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation became official on January 1, 1863.

Though celebrated in Black communities for generations, the day only recently has gained attention with white people and the call to recognize Juneteenth as a US federal holiday has gained steam. And though much of the entertainment industry will take Friday off, social impact agency Inspire Justice, which educates and trains stars, influencers and media companies to use their platforms for social good, has a different recommendation: "a day on."

Brea Baker, director of programming for Inspire Justice, and Taylor K. Shaw, social impact advisor for the organization as well as founder and CEO of production company Black Women Animate, talked to The Hollywood Reporter about how they recommend Hollywood spends Juneteenth, what they advise their celebrity clients to post and why the holiday's recognition is significant.

There's been lots of discussion recently around Juneteenth as a paid holiday, but your group Inspire Justice says we should focus on a day on rather than a day off. Can you explain?

Brea Baker: The idea behind the day on is similar to MLK Day and the idea that allies specifically should not be using the day as just another paid holiday, but rather a day to be specifically intentional about racial justice and anti-Blackness in this country specifically with the history of Juneteenth and its connection to the abolition of slavery, it should be day for self education on that legacy. The idea is that obviously Black folks should definitely take the day to rest and to celebrate and to enjoy, but for those who are not as closely tied to the specific history behind this holiday, they should take that time to learn about that history, to be in service to the Black community, etc.

What are some specific ways that entertainment companies should spend Juneteenth?

Baker: What we've been advocating to others is that they should be modeling for the rest of the industry and encouraging people, especially because this is so new and many teams have just made the decision to celebrate it as a day off this week, that in that time, they're able to model whether that's through their social media platform or internal communication with their team that they're letting folks know the intentionality behind what Juneteenth means. It's not just another day to just to be lax, but to maintain the sanctity of the day is really important. The industry obviously has so many different vehicles and platforms to be able to get that message out to a larger audience, so I think that's what the opportunity is on Friday.

Taylor K. Shaw:For the entertainment industry, having Juneteenth be less of a day of reflection and another day of action is what we should be encouraging across the board. I'm the founder and CEO of BWA studios, which was created to further build equity, specifically in the animation industry, but really serve as a blueprint for what is possible when we center the voices, stories and works of creatives of color. The industry also needs to take really big steps toward making solid, not momentary, but long-lasting commitment toward equity and that really has to be a key focus on Friday for the industry"Okay, like what real, tangible and actual change are we going to start to implement within our companies and how is that going to be spread throughout the industry?"

How do we make sure this day doesn't go the way of #BlackoutTuesday, when there was a lot of criticism over silence and performative activism?

Baker:Inspire Justice has been doing a lot of work to organize celebrities to be a part of this. I think what happened with #BlackoutTuesday was that something that was started specifically for one industry morphed into something larger and there just wasn't a cohesive narrative that was being shared, so it was updating as the day went on and as things were becoming clear that certain hashtags were being consumed. What we've been trying to avoid, one, is by holding webinars and educating those with large platforms on what the history of Juneteenth actually is; we did one of those webinars on Wednesday and had a really great audience of influencers and industry leaders in the space to be a part of that conversation. Then we follow up each of these webinars with calls-to-action assets and talking points to supporting people and understanding, "What are vetted ways that you can engage with us on social media? What are Black activists asking of us all in this moment?"

#BlackoutTuesday, because it was something that came up so organically, there wasn't that time to put in that preparation, but Juneteenth is something that has been celebrated since 1866 so Black communities specifically have been knowing that Juneteenth was coming up. We as a company have been able to pull together resources and assets and essentially a toolkit for how to engage with Juneteenth in that way. There are others doing great work as well, especially the #HellaJuneteenth team that is getting folks in the industry to commit to making it a paid holiday. They're also going further by providing them resources on what out-of-office emails could look like and what templates you can use to engage for the first time on the topic.

What's your message for how stars and influencers should be using their platform for Juneteenth?

Baker:The main thing that we've been encouraging folks is to really center Black voices; I think the times when things go most awry or when it's like, "Oh, I just got called out, my intentions are pure," are often when people are trying to speak for others. You can't go wrong by uplifting Black activists and community leaders who already have the trust of the community and also have that context, they can really contextualize what Juneteenth means in 2020. We've really been encouraging people to uplift from existing leadership like Movement for Black Lives and the Black Lives Matter Global Network. Also you can't go wrong by modeling for people what you don't know. I think sometimes, especially with influencers who are expected to be experts on a lot of different things, there's this urge to allow for that illusion and to try and maintain the illusion of being an expert. There's so much power in saying, "This is my first time hearing about this holiday, I'm taking the cues of Black activists who are asking us to do X, Y, and Z."

Something that we shared on Wednesday's Inspire Justice webinar was encouraging people to actually uplift the resources that they were going to dive into. So you're going to spend the day binge-listening to a podcast or watching the 13th documentary or reading a book by a Black author, share that with your followers and let them know: "For the day, this is the action that I'm taking to self educate and I encourage you to do the same." There's so many resources out there as to where we can start with that, I believe this was the first time that the New York Times bestsellers list was exclusively made up of books by Black authors. There's so much out there that we don't need to do too much digging about and there's a lot of great information that already exists so we don't really need to reinvent the wheel. That's what we've really been encouraging: when in doubt, repost and credit live leaders and black activists.

What's the importance of Juneteenth finally being widely recognized, both in Hollywood and beyond?

Baker: The biggest opportunity is raising awareness for the true history of the day. I think what's important to note is that the Emancipation Proclamation was signed in 1863 but all Black Americans weren't notified of their freedom until 1865. It's important to remember that because we have a history in this country of taking shortcuts at the expense of Black communities and that justice delayed is something that Black communities have traditionally been experiencing. When, especially those who are involved in entertainment and media and shaping the narrative that people knowingly or unknowingly take into their day-to-day lives and day-to-day actions, it's important that we continue to be honest about the history of this country. The narrative of "this isn't who we are" or "I'm just learning about these things" is coming from a place of being uninformed about the reality of how long and far this country has gone to ensure that Black lives were tertiary to the needs of the economy, to the needs of white society, etc. So just being really intentional about not letting this day be whitewashed or being diluted is really important, and then taking that time to also talk about "What does it mean for us to be celebrating a day about freedom in a time where most people do not feel free? What is the responsibility of the industry to be a part of creating action shifts?" to Taylor's point.

Shaw:We are in the business of story, so Hollywood, it's time to shift the narrative and get the stories right. Just as we encourage people to share the voices of color Friday on social media, Hollywood, it has to be even more than that yes, do that, but it's important to share the true narratives of black people and really start to do that now with Juneteenth. This story, people don't know it and the true history of Black folks and displaced people being emancipated, we didn't even get that information. So it's going to be important for Hollywood to to share the mic as we say, and to really be committed to doing that in a meaningful and not just momentary way.

What would you like to see Juneteenth become going forward?

Shaw: A national holiday and day of action.

Baker: Heightened political power. Something that I shared in Wednesday's webinar was that the first time that Juneteenth was celebrated, it was formerly enslaved Black people coming together, pooling resources and buying land. The idea was that we had achieved some wins but we still had work to do. To Taylor's point around day of action, I just feel like specifically action around building political power and ensuring that black people actually have not just a seat at the table but a stake.

What's your outlook at this moment and going forward?

Baker:I'm definitely optimistic about things. There's a beautiful Angela Davis quote that basically says, "To be an activist is to be an optimist because you have to believe that you can actually transform the world to engage in this kind of work." So I'm definitely optimistic and I'm also excited to see that many people are also interested in having the conversation of "Wait, we've been here before, why are we repeating the same conversations?" and looking to disrupt that cycle.

Shaw:For me as a black woman, of course I was aware and deeply connected to all of these issues, but the collective awakening that we're seeing, it feels like a paradigm shift. So I am energized and excited, with Inspire Justice, to play a key role in how Hollywood really takes this moment and is on the right side of history in this paradigm shift.

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Inspire Justice Activists on Juneteenth in Hollywood and Using the Day Off as a "Day On" - Hollywood Reporter

Most of the Verzuz battles weve experienced so far have been the result of popular demand.

Swizz Beatz and Timbaland take requests into account, so that leads us to what will most likely be a spectacular piano battle between Alicia Keys and John Legend on Friday, June 19. The dynamic singer-songwriter virtuosos will celebrate Junetheeth 2020 by playing hit singles and hopefully giving us some Hazel Scott and Scott Joplin action on the piano.

So, what is Juneteenth?

Lets delve into a quick history lesson.

The Emancipation Proclamation was signed by Abraham Lincoln in September 1862 and went into effect on January 1, 1863. It abolished slavery in the Confederacy and freed over 3.5 million Black people, but it took a while before it was fully in effect. Lincolns first Southern reading of the Emancipation Proclamation took place that year in Virginia, at what is known today as The Emancipation Oak. That oak tree now stands at the entrance of Hampton University, one of the most well-known Historically Black Colleges and Universities in the United States. HBCUs began to pop up around the country, mostly in the South, shortly after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect, in response to the need for freed slaves to learn trades and get an education.

However, some rebel forces continued to resist the abolition of slavery, and news traveled slowly in those days, so it took two years for everyone to get (and accept) the memo. Some slaveholders had migrated to Texas to escape the fighting, and they brought slaves with them. Its estimated that there were about 250,000 enslaved people living in Texas at that time. News of General Lees surrender didnt reach that region until April 1865, and some slaveholders withheld that information from their human chattel.

The last of the resisting forces didnt surrender until June 2, and on June 18, Union Army general Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texaswith troopsand announced the emancipation of slaves.

The rest is history, as celebrations broke out the following day, which became known as Juneteenth or Freedom Day.

Juneteenth is rarely taught in schools, but it has long been part of the curriculum for African-American Studies courses.

Earlier this week, New York governor Andrew Cuomo issued an executive order making Juneteenth a paid holiday for state employees. Other places, such as Google, Target, Nike, and here at Fast Company, have followed suit by acknowledging Juneteenth as a special day to celebrate that auspicious moment in American history.

Now, back to Alicia Keys and John Legend.

Both Keys and Legend are known for positive music and their social justice work, so this is going to be the uplifting celebration we need, much like the last Verzuz led by Kirk Franklin and Fred Hammond.

Weve seen Keys channel Hazel Scott by playing two pianos at once.

And weve seen John Legend mostly playing it cool.

Alicia Augello Cook grew up in New York Citys Hells Kitchen neighborhood, where she was exposed to diverse sounds and cultures. She began taking piano lessons at age seven and started writing her own music about four years later. She attended Professional Performing Arts High School in Manhattans theater district, where she honed her vocal skills. She was musically and academically gifted, and she graduated from high school at age 16 as class valedictorian.

Upon graduation, she entertained offers from Columbia University and Columbia Records but found juggling school and a music career difficult. In the end, she continued pursuing music professionally under the name Alicia Keys. The deal with Columbia Records didnt work out, but she bounced back by aligning herself with legendary recording executive Clive Davis. At that time, Davis was with Arista Records, but when he left in 2000 and founded J Records, Keys followed.

Her debut album, Songs in A Minor, was released in June 2001, when she was about 19. It was driven by her No. 1 pop hit, Fallin. People fell in love with Keyss sound, which blended elements of classical music, due to her piano riffs, with hip-hop, contemporary, and classic R&B. She rocked braids with beads and fedoras and looked like a neo-soul star but had the edge of hip-hop. Both her fashion and musical stylings were unique and helped draw people in. She went on to release several other well-received albums, won several Grammys, and created life anthems such as Empire State of Mind (with Jay Z), Girl on Fire, and No One.

John Stephens got his musical start early in life, playing piano and singing in church. Like Keys, he was also an academic prodigy and enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania at age 16. He started to make a name for himself on the Philadelphia music scene and got his first break playing piano on Lauryn Hills 1999 hit Everything Is Everything.

He also contributed guest vocals to Jay-Zs Encore (2003) and Janet Jacksons I Want You (2004).

He began touring around that timeas John Stephens. He performed on the college circuit as an opening act at homecomings and also secured a major label deal. His debut album, Get Lifted, was released in 2004, and by that time he had replaced his last name with Legend. Combining gospel and R&B, Get Lifted turned Legend into a multiplatinum, Grammy-winning star.

Today, Legend is among the elite company of EGOT winners, having won an Emmy for executive producing Jesus Christ Superstar Live in Concert, along with those several Grammys; an Oscar for writing and performing Glory (the song from Ava DuVerneys Selma); and a Tony for producing August Wilsons Jitney.

Both stars have served as vocal coaches on NBCs The Voice, where they stood out with their honest but constructive advice. Keys flexed her acting chops in 2006s Smokin Acesand 2008s The Secret Life of Bees, while Legend appeared in 2008s Soul Men and 2016s La La Land.

Keys, through her AK Worldwide company, is set to produce a Barry Jenkins-directed biopic about the barrier-breaking choreographer Alvin Ailey, while Legends Get Lifted Film Co. has several projects on the horizon, having signed an overall deal with ABC Studios last year.

On top of all that, both Keys and Legend are deeply involved with social justice and humanitarian issues. Keyss Keep a Child Alive combats the physical, social, and economic impacts of HIV/AIDS around the world. Legends The Bail Project is setting the framework for reimagining the criminal justice system.

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The fans guide to the special Juneteenth Verzuz starring Alicia Keys and John Legend - Fast Company

In the wake of national and international protests against police brutality after the killing of George Floyd, activists and organizers affiliated with the group Campaign Zero released a plan called #8CantWait, listing eight policies that they claim would reduce police violence by 72 percent. The policies include banning chokeholds and strangleholds, requiring a warning before shooting, and requiring other officers to intervene when excessive force is being used. The campaign took off, with the #8CantWait hashtag trending on Twitter and explainer articles appearing across mainstream media.

It was quickly made clear, however, that some of these reforms have already been instituted by police departments implicated in high-profile police killings. The Minneapolis Police Department had seven of the eight reforms in place when George Floyd was choked to death. When Eric Garner was killed, chokeholds had already been banned in the New York City Police Department. More recently, NPR published a story pointing out that bans on chokeholds have proven difficult to enforce over decades.

More from Marcia Brown

Derecka Purnell, a police abolitionist organizer and lawyer, said in an interview with the Prospect that the morning after the #8CantWait campaign was released, her phone was flooded with messages, emails, and missed calls. My lawyer friends reached out and they were like, I dont know what to do, but we need to start moving on this, Purnell recalled.

The 72 percent number, she said, was faulty. The idea that we can reduce police violence with these eight reformsthe claim was just so false and I was just so shocked.

The pushback from police abolitionists, a loose network of organizers and lawyers who had been quietly laying the groundwork for their movement and now saw it being co-opted by weak reforms, was immediate and furious. Purnell established a group chat for brainstorming ideas for a response. At the same time, authors Cherrell Brown and Philip V. McHarris published a public letter on Medium showing that the #8CantWait campaign was based on faulty data science and calling for the campaign to be recalled.

Other organizers began developing a direct response to the campaign, calling it #8toAbolition. In just 24 hours, the website was live.

The reason it was able to come together so quickly is because there is such a rich history of abolitionist organizing, said Micah Herskind, one of the authors of the #8toAbolition campaign. This is a movement thats going back decades. The decades of scholarship and organizing on police abolition has largely been undertaken by black women. Critical Resistance, an organization spreading abolitionist politics, started in the 1990s. We honor the work of abolitionists who have come before us, and those who organize now, the #8toAbolition website reads. We refuse to allow the blatant co-optation of decades of abolitionist organizing toward reformist ends that erases the work of Black feminist theorists. Said Reina Sultan, another #8toAbolition organizer, Its mostly black women and femmes who work in this space and thats why its being erased.

ABOLITIONISTS ARGUE THAT this is a crucial moment, with the public much more open to the ideas of abolition politics and policies. Thats why the #8CantWait campaign is so harmful, they say, because it derails momentum toward the kind of non-reformist reforms that they say will lead to less harm and make obvious how existing systems reproduce harm. How do you have people in the streets calling to disband the police force and youre gonna put out a demand that says, Warn before shooting? said Herskind. He called the agenda items in the #8CantWait framework at best neutral and at worst harmful.

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In response, organizers for #8CantWait included some abolitionist frameworks on its website, even adding an abolition icon. But it did not eliminate the campaigns original reformist action items. Now that they see that the movement has shifted Campaign Zeros website has all the [abolition] stuff there, Purnell explained. But the core of what theyre about is still there. They change the name of the campaign. They released a very bad statement. Its frankly embarrassing.

During the same week, the Equal Justice Initiative released a report abolitionists say was aimed at reforms and not transformational change. Similarly, the abolitionist community online expressed worry that the report would distract from abolition when the Overton window among the public was shifting so dramatically.

In 2014, the year Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, just 43 percent of Americans viewed police killings of black Americans as a sign of broader problems. In 2020, that number is 69 percent. The number of Americans who think racial discrimination in the U.S. is a big problem is up to 76 percent, from 51 percent in 2015. And according to The New York Times, American voters support for the Black Lives Matter movement increased in two weeks as much as it had in the preceding two years.

The Minneapolis Police Department already had seven of the eight #8CantWait reforms in place when George Floyd was choked to death.

Alex Vitale, a police abolitionist and author of the 2018 book The End of Policing, explained in an interview that reforms like those of the #8CantWait campaign are not designed to do what they say they willminimize contact between law enforcement and vulnerable people. Non-reformist reforms, the kind abolitionists champion, are designed to diminish the power of police in communities. Defund the Police, a slogan that has become popular among demonstrators around the country, speaks to this point: By reducing police funding, police are unable to have the kind of contact with communities that so often leads to violence and deadly force.

Vitale also explained that the moment was ripe because there already was an ecosystem of on-the-ground organizing since the 2014 Ferguson protests, preparing the public for an abolitionist message. These were small movements who had a concrete plan to demand shifts in police funding to community-identified needs and many of them had identified some specific dollar targets and specific programs they wanted eliminated or created, he explained. So when George Floyd was killed, the movements were already past the idea that body cameras were the logical fix. These organizers set the tone that said This is not about a bunch of superficial procedural reforms, this is about getting the police out of our lives in as many ways as we can, Vitale added.

The backlash has had an impact. On June 9, one of Campaign Zeros team members, activist Brittany Packnett, announced she was leaving Campaign Zero over the controversy and lack of transparency regarding the #8CantWait campaign. I take responsibility and apologize for having shared and posted its latest initiative, she wrote in her statement. What may have applied in 2014 is not necessarily relevant for the transformation we are precipitating today.

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Purnell, who said shes known Packnett for decades, said she thinks stepping down was the best thing she could have done.

A lot of people in Campaign Zero have a lot of popularity but being popular doesnt make you an expert, Purnell added. Because of the popularity, people default to them as people who know [solutions].

The same day as Packnetts announcement, The Daily Show hosted a roundtable with organizers and experts on radical police reform. Campaign Zero founder Sam Sinyangwe said that the #8CantWait organizers recognize that the moment was unique, which was why they shifted the campaigns message toward abolition. The ultimate demand that we are hearing is that people want to reimagine and transform the current system. They wanna defund the police, they wanna build alternatives But ultimately the goal should be ending police violence entirely. And we recognize that and we recognize that I think the best strategy to do that is to be supporting the work thats happening on the ground and shifting those resources away from police and into community-based alternatives.

While some have portrayed #8CantWaits pivot as a success for abolitionists, Herskind remains skeptical. Its not that these are not the best demands, but theyre the wrong demands, he explained. We need to be clear about the fact that these reforms do not put us on the path toward abolition.

THE #8TOABOLITION CAMPAIGN spread fast enough that just days after its release, Herskind said he was attending a rally when an organizer he didnt know handed him a flyer with the #8toAbolition organizing principles. Within days, Herskind tweeted that the campaign would be translated into over 20 languages. The campaign also now features community-led models of building safety and collective care in an abolitionist world.

Several #8toAbolition authors also published an essay in Wear Your Voice magazine about what an abolitionist world looks like. The long history of police reform in the United States shows how reformism has only functioned to embolden and escalate the carceral state, they wrote.

Organizers have pointed out that despite #8toAbolitions early success, the momentum of the #8CantWait campaign has already been harmful to the abolitionist movement, as cities and states have opted for the less disruptive alternative, adopting the #8CantWait campaigns proposals, and then shirking abolitionists calls for non-reformist reforms.

Weve seen the film. We know what happens, Purnell said. Theres the killing. Theres the uprising. Theres the DOJ investigation, the consent decrees, and then the non-indictment.

Vitale acknowledged that there is some stuff in the #8CantWait plan that could be understood as a non-reformist reform. But in a way, the defund movement is really what people are talking about Were engaged in a realistic concrete politics today that we believe will lead us in the direction of some dramatically better future.

Purnell emphasized how important this moment was for helping people understand the politics of abolition. The streets [right now] are the results of decades-long organizing, she said. These ideas may be new to some people but theyre not new to society. When you hear Defund the Police, ask yourself whos been talking about this, whos been doing this work and where can I learn more.

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How Police Abolitionists Are Seizing the Moment - The American Prospect

Police brutality has a surprisingly long history in comedy.

An officer swinging a nightstick was one of the most common images in early comic strips and Charlie Chaplin was always running from the police, dodging clubs and bullets. Those cops were generally portrayed as clownish bullies, and their violence, divorced from any racial context, played as a kind of shtick. When they swung their clubs, you never really felt the blow.

More than anyone else, Richard Pryor changed that.

He wasnt the first stand-up to take aim at racist policing. The pioneering political comic Dick Gregory, in his 1961 debut album, In Living Black & White, quipped: In Chicago, we have enough cops. Its just a matter of getting them on our side.

In the next decade, Richard Pryor, a student of both Chaplin and Gregory, applied a biting, more visceral perspective while making analysis of racist policing a hallmark of his. His albums and specials in that era laid the foundation for modern stand-up, and nowhere is that more true than in sets about police brutality. Some comics have broached the topic without bringing personal experience to the subject. But others, especially African-American stand-ups, have consistently examined the pain, costs and arguments around biased law enforcement in a way that has been rare in Hollywood.

Pryor once said he was raised to hate the cops, and his comedy was alive to the hurt and humiliations of everyday police abuse. He didnt just say the police beat up black people. They degraded them. His cops werent the bumbling fools of silent films. They were dangerous. And two decades before Ice Cube rapped about black police showing out for the white cops, Pryors set piece about I Spy cops a reference to the TV show starring Bill Cosby and Robert Culp as an interracial team of intelligence agents described black partners of white officers earning their stripes by harassing black civilians. About jail, he joked: You go down looking for justice, thats what youll find. Just us.

In his breakthrough 1974 album, Pryor wondered why persistent police brutality didnt make black people go mad. Then, using his masterful dramatic powers, he invited his audience to imagine a man who works hard during the week rewarding himself with a night out and getting dressed up, only to be pulled over because of a robbery in the neighborhood. Dramatizing the violation of the pat down, Pryor considers the impact, imitating the deflated man, who abruptly ends the evening to go home and beat your kids. That gut punch quiets the crowd, before Pryor adds: You have to take it out on somebody.

In contrast with the amiable treatment white people receive from a friendly cop who lives in their neighborhood, Pryor demonstrated how black people must make a show of being nonthreatening when stopped. Enunciating every word slowly at a volume and tension that performs compliance, he did an impression of what was required: I. Am Reaching. Into. My. Pocket. For. My License.

That record sold more than one million copies and was so popular that after one show, Detroit officers told Pryor they heard the line repeated from an African-American man they stopped.

Many jokes in the past few decades owe a debt to that four-minute bit. For instance, in his recent special, Michael Che says, My brother is a cop. I only see him over Thanksgiving and even then, Im like: Im. Reaching. For. The. Potatoes.

In Dave Chappelles classic debut special, Killing Them Softly, he also does a bit contrasting the difference between black and white people when stopped by the police that echoes Pryor, even down to some of the language of the cops. Chappelle, however, digs deeper into white privilege. Describing a time he was stopped with a white friend, he sounds flabbergasted when his pal immediately confessed to the cop that he was stoned and asked for directions. A black man would never dream of talking to the police high, he says. Thats a waste of weed.

Roy Wood Jr. also has a sharp bit about the lengths black people must go to appear nonthreatening to the police: He says hes going to start wearing a cap and gown. In recent years, that note of resignation had crept into comedy about this issue, as performers look at, for instance, how ordinary the killings of black men and women at the hands of police have become. In 2015, Jerrod Carmichael made a fake ad for Funny or Die about smartphones marketed to black families: The devices were designed to film police violence. (For a limited time, each member of the plan gets a special brutality-proof case for free.) Chris Rock began his latest Netflix special with this line: You would think the cops would occasionally kill a white kid just to make it look good.

Long before television and movie portraits of the police were being re-examined by critics and artists in the wake of the recent Black Lives Matter protests, Seaton Smith had a sharp, understated bit on Conan about his love for TV cops who follow their own rules. Now Im like, mmmm, follow the rules. In 2018, Wyatt Cenac dedicated an entire season of his HBO show Problem Areas to issues of policing, which has now been put online for free. He examined with nuance many of the reform ideas that were once seen as marginal but have now moved toward the mainstream, like the abolition of the police.

When Pryor joked about police brutality in the mid-1970s, he was speaking to a white audience that he assumed would be skeptical. His premise was that they didnt see what was going on in his community. But in stand-up, that perspective shifted, particularly after the police beating of Rodney King and the subsequent protests in the 1990s. By 2000, Dave Chappelle was saying that police brutality was common knowledge among white people, before needling them for once being skeptical. Didnt you think it was a little suspicious that every black person the police find has crack sprinkled on them?

Still, police abuses have become such a common subject in comedy that it can feel as if weve returned to the days of the Keystone Kops, when aggressive law enforcement was just another trope. In his new stand-up special Out to Lunch, shot before the recent protests, Mark Normand says that the news has been so disturbing that he looks to the little things, like those Fun Facts inside the cap of a Snapple bottle. He gives an example: Polar bears used to be brown, but through evolution they turned white, because police were shooting them.

Comics are doing work on police brutality with more gravity even if the pandemic has limited their ability to work on material. Some of the most powerful statements on social media have been from comics like Jon Laster, who turned his Instagram page into a collection of shattering testimonials from black people about interactions with the police.

As often happens, Dave Chappelle set the pace with a set he performed near his home in Ohio and released last week. At one point, he expressed anger at the CNN host Don Lemon, who had asked why celebrities had not spoken out. Exasperated, Chappelle asked if Lemon had ever seen his work? He had a point.

Over the past few decades, Chappelle has repeatedly made comedy from the pain of police brutality, but what stood out about his recent set was how his typically grave tone didnt pivot to a joke, how often he let his unfiltered outrage sit there. Just as Hannah Gadsby stopped offering punch lines in Nanette, Chappelle went long stretches without jokes, producing a kind of stand-up tragedy. When he asked what the police officer whose knee was on the neck of George Floyd could be thinking, he spoke with a righteous anger that comedy could not address. There are limits to what a joke can do.

What makes Chappelle such a master storyteller is how he telescopes broad swaths of history through his personal narrative in a way that lets you know the past haunts the present. Such continuity tells its own sad story. Look at stand-up comedy and youll find more than 60 years of jokes about police brutality. Whats not funny is how little theyve changed.

Link:

How Richard Pryor Changed the Way Comedy Sees Police Brutality - The New York Times