This year, June 16 is a federally recognized holiday for the first time. However, until recently, it was not something that was widely celebrated in the US
For black Americans, however, June 16—a celebration commemorating the arrival of Union troops in Galveston, Texas on June 19, 1865, which secured the freedom of enslaved people there under the provisions of the Emancipation Proclamation of 1862—is the same date as the Fourth of July. .
Lenworth ‘Joonbug’ McIntosh via We Are Hella Creative/Digital Trends Graphic
Last year, hundreds of companies and thousands of citizens accepted for the first time on June 16, following the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer amid months of protests and online activism that erupted in the aftermath. Thanks to a group of creatives who seized the momentum and launched a clever, well-timed social media campaign, millions of people around the world became motivated to recognize June 16 as an official holiday and tell their legislators to do the same.
Juneteenth: What You Need to Know | History
Raised in Houston, Miles Dotson“creative technologist” and entrepreneur, he celebrated June 1st every year with his family, but for the longest time he thought it was just a regional event.
“It just seemed like a Texas thing,” he said. “When I was in college, I traveled to all these other places around Juneteenth and noticed that it was kind of acknowledged and respected, but not necessarily a big deal.”
All that changed in 2020.
As the coronavirus pandemic swept the country, Dotson and his colleagues worried that the community of creatives they had built would be dramatically affected. So they created a Slack channel, branded themselves and invited friends from different professions and industries into “one ecosystem,” he said.
HellaCreative, a Bay Area collective of artists, content creators, designers and developers, held weekly happy hours and hosted discussion boards where people could collaborate and connect, albeit not in person.
After the news of Floyd’s death last May, the group was devastated. The video quickly spread online and was “visually devastating” to watch, Dotson said. And yet, HellaCreative still made the effort to gather at that week’s happy hour to “hold the space” and talk about what’s next.
“Over the past years with Black Lives Matter and a whole bunch of other movements that are broadly expressed around blackness and just the spirit of liberation and moving the culture forward, we’ve talked about doing something for Juneteenth,” he said.
It was at that virtual meeting that the hashtag and corresponding campaign for #HellaJuneteenth was born. The group’s stylish shareable logo (with matching graphics), created by Quinnton Harris, made the campaign go viral.
Dotson and the HellaCreative team launched a #HellaJuneteenth landing page, filled with testimonials, educational resources and opportunities to email local and state representatives, on Friday, June 5, 2020 — 11 days after Floyd’s death.
The response was immediate.
By the following Monday, tech executives, including Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, were promoting the website as a resource for followers to learn about Juneteenth. Before 2020, many non-black Americans knew very little about the holiday.
“It was like a fire hose,” Dotson said. “We didn’t really have time to consciously think about what was going on, we were just very responsive in riding the wave, staying up late at night until three or four in the morning to update the site.”
Within five days of its launch, more than 600 companies, including VSCO, Adobe, Lyft, Spotify and Netflix, signed on to accept Juneteenth as a paid, corporate holiday for their employees.
As of today, the digital reach of the #HellaJuneteenth campaign has totaled over 300 million unique impressions (the number of times that content was viewed).
Lenworth ‘Joonbug’ McIntosh via We Are Hella Creative
“When we started putting this together, we wanted people to really care about this holiday and help our friends in corporate America claim that day off,” Dotson said. “We wanted to provide positive opposition to the devastation we felt.”
Momentum for online social justice campaigns has since slowed, but Dotson believes that’s natural. For decades, attempts have been made to make June 16 a national holiday. Currently, 47 states recognize it, but only Texas gives its state employees a paid day off. However, that could soon change if the newly introduced bill S. 475 passes both houses of Congress and becomes law.
No matter what happens, Dotson is optimistic – as are the other members of HellaCreative. Last year’s results proved social media’s ability to mobilize people to effectively drive change and reignite the Juneteenth discourse that predates this generation, and perhaps the generation before.
“Social media has played a role in accelerating the spread of this conversation,” he said. “It is not necessarily beneficial that there is such a high volume of activity. The goal is for people to start to advance the conversation about liberation and do work at home and come back to the workplace and have the conversation there.”
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Source: newstars.edu.vn