BROOKLYN (CN) — While daily demonstrations and protests continue across New York City into the fourth week after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, thousands of Brooklynites supporting the Black Lives Matter movement peacefully took to the streets on Friday to celebrate the Juneteenth.
Also known as Freedom Day, Juneteenth celebrates the emancipation of more than 250,000 slaves at the close of the Civil War.
A century and a half later, a crowd of thousands — activists, allies and a handful of local politicians — gathered on Friday afternoon on the steps of Brooklyn Museum at the intersection of Eastern Parkway and Washington Avenue, near Prospect Park.
Speaking on a megaphone on the sidewalk in front of the museum, Josué “Josh” Pierre, a Haitian-born Democratic District Leader, called to cut $1 billion from the NYPD and reallocate those funds to the city’s public school system.
NYC Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, the highest-ranking black elected official in New York, said the civil rights protests and demonstrations occurring across the country since George Floyd’s death are the result of a nation that has failed to address the historical context of slavery to this day.
“When we talk about Juneteenth, we are talking about American history,” said Williams, who as New York City Public Advocate, is first in line to succeed a mayor who is removed before the end of their term.
“Frankly speaking, if we had full understanding in this country of what Juneteenth has meant for this country, we wouldn’t be having this conversation in the first place,” Williams added.
“We are here because a country has refused to reckon with and atone for the original sin and refused to talk about how to fix the fact that we had an entire race enslaved in this country that was there simply to undergird the system of privilege that we have here in 2020,” he said.
“It should not have taken three weeks of unrest and how many people killed in all to celebrate Juneteenth. Equity and justice should not be revolutionary words. They are only revolutionary words in the system that is built on enslaved people, in a system that is about privilege,” Williams said on Friday afternoon.
Jabari Brisport, a black public school teacher and a Democratic Socialist candidate for state Senate, blamed capitalism for the nation's original sin of slavery and the systematic racism that supplanted it.
"I stand before you today on Juneteenth as a proud black socialist," Brisport said triumphantly from the steps of the Brooklyn Museum.
"Because I know, and we know, it was capitalism that brought black people to this country," he said. "It was capitalism that fueled redlining in education and housing and health care."
Phara Souffrant Forrest, another Democratic Socialist candidate on the June 23 ticket for the 57th Assembly District, followed Brisport on the steps of the museum.
Forrest, a union nurse, said Friday that she’s tired of “being a sacrificial lamb” along with other essential workers during the coronavirus crisis.
“I’m tired of the bullshit. I don’t want to hear about the half-assed excuses from our politicians,” she said. “I don’t want to hear about ‘We can, but.’ Who’s tired of these ‘buts?’”
“No more cuts to things that we actually need. Defund the fucking killer cops called NYPD,” she exclaimed to cheers from the multiracial crowd.
Last weekend, 15,000 people, predominantly dressed all in white, packed into the same location to rally in support of the Black Trans Lives Matter. Spray paint stencils of the movement’s name were speckled on sidewalks around the museum.
At the top of the steps on Friday, Brooklyn poet and organizer Jive Poetic recited “Go Home,” a meditation on the lessons and survival instincts that black parents pass on to their children to navigate a turbulent and often violent environment.