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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.
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.”
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Sincerely,
Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
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