Juneteenth 2021: A time for celebration amid activism in Alabama town

[link removed]

Esther Schrader | Read the full piece here

[link removed]

Friend,

When the eve of Juneteenth comes to the plaza outside the
county courthouse in Florence, Alabama, this year, Camille Bennett and
her committed group of social justice activists will be dancing.

This plaza may seem an unlikely place for celebration, overshadowed as
it is by a 20-foot-tall Confederate monument erected at the height of
the Jim Crow era. But dancing is joy, and joy is power, says Bennett.
That's why, as the weekend marking the end of slavery in the
United States 156 years ago begins, the group plans to fill the public
space in their predominantly white city with rejoicing, in defiance of
the statue that brings so much pain.

One might argue that Bennett and the movement she founded in 2014,
Project Say Something, don't have a lot to celebrate. Since they
began their push first to broaden the historically white-centered
narrative of their community to incorporate the dark underpinnings of
its history and then to relocate the statue, they have endured threats
of violence, racist online messages and counter-protesters waving
Confederate flags. A local white pastor suggested in 2020 that
Bennett's mouth should be wired shut. And at an LGBTQ Pride
event in 2017, five members of the Ku Klux Klan wearing hoods and
robes showed up while Bennett was speaking. She was the only Black
speaker at the event.
[link removed]

But none of that will stop the dancing.

"We really wanted to make sure the focus was joy," Bennett
said of the celebration she is leading June 18, the evening before the
Juneteenth holiday, which became a federal holiday this week.
"The statue is a piece of stone, and we want it to go. But the
point is not the statue, it's the false story it tells, that
erases our own stories. We are not going to let that happen. On
Juneteenth we will be dancing in the streets. We will fill that space
with Black culture and Black joy."

READ MORE

[link removed]

Sincerely,

Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center

 

The SPLC is a catalyst for racial justice in the South and beyond,
working in partnership with communities to dismantle white supremacy,
strengthen intersectional movements, and advance the human rights of
all people.

DONATE

[link removed]



--
Unsubscribe [link removed] | Privacy Policy [link removed] | Contact Us [link removed]

Southern Poverty Law Center
400 Washington Avenue
Montgomery, AL 36104
334.956.8200 // splcenter.org
[link removed]

Copyright 2021