As the global right wing casts its shadow, we draw strength from the long tradition of Black internationalism.
Anti-poverty activists constructing plywood and canvas tents, known as Resurrection City, on the National Mall as part of the Poor People's Campaign in Washington, D.C., on May 13, 1968.Transport yourself back into the past, to the year 1865. What if you had been a slave? You had seen friends and family sold. You had been whipped and worked to exhaustion. Every day was a nightmare.
In 2024, 159 years later, it is a national holiday. Across the U.S., Black America celebrates the end of slavery. From cities like New York and Atlanta to small towns, throngs gather to grill food as teens spin in double Dutch ropes. Music booms from speakers so big, it makes beer tremble in your cup.The first national Juneteenth, in 2021, came a year after the George Floyd protests. Today, it arrives amid a white supremacist backlash.
Black internationalism does not begin in suffering but in the resistance to it. The dynamic created in the slave ship cargo holds and sweltering plantations become a powerful force that set the direction of history. Africans rose like a phoenix, reborn as Black people. They rose from colonial states, ghettos and prisons. They rose from Jim Crow and redlining and the “drug war.
The question is what does it mean now? A year after Biden signed the holiday into law, he stated, “The answer is not to defund the police. The answer is to fund the police,” and has continuously sought tofunding for so-called law enforcement. Democratic mayors of the largest cities in the U.S. have raised police budgets year after year. On the other side of the aisle, a coordinated right-wing assault on Black history and Black— even as politicians court Black male voters — has gained momentum.
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