It was on June 19, 1865, that Union soldiers marched into Texas to tell all the people that the Civil War was over and slavery had been ended – two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863. Immediately, many newly emancipated people took off for northern states, went to look for family members in other southern states, joined the more than four thousand self-liberated men and women who had been welcomed into México, or traveled even further to homestead in the West.

But we also believe that poverty is violence. Like bombs and batons, poverty kills. And like police violence, incarceration, homelessness and paltry health care, poverty disproportionately affects the lives of our African American sisters and brothers. We are appalled that, though only 22 percent of counties in the United States are disproportionately Black, 60 percent of the nation’s COVID-19 deaths are in these counties.

Therefore, ICUJP celebrates Juneteenth as part of our ongoing struggle to free:

• enslaved people throughout the world who are trafficked for labor or sex,
  
  
• people in wage slavery, working low-wage and often dangerous jobs for lack of alternatives, disproportionately the descendants of those freed by the Emancipation Proclamation or liberated on Juneteenth,
  
  
• exploited prison labor,
  
  
• people who are locked up, deported and being separated from their families because of their immigration status, for trying to find a better violence-free life, and
  
  
• all victims of racial, economic, judicial, and environmental violence and injustice.