Last Updated on June 19, 2023
Violent crime has once again plagued Juneteenth weekend all across the United States, leaving multiple people dead and wounded in the very communities that the holiday was supposed to celebrate and benefit.
The Juneteenth weekend violence spanned the entire country, with shootings reported on the east coast, the west coast, and numerous stops in between.
In Asheville, North Carolina, a 16-year-old has been arrested after shooting 2 other juveniles at a downtown Juneteenth bash on Saturday. Due to the shooting, Asheville’s Martin Luther King Association, the organizers of what was supposed to be a weekend-long Juneteenth celebration, were forced to cancel Sunday’s events.
“We are terribly sorry and sad for the inconvenience after having had such a wonderful day of bringing communities together,” the group said in a public statement announcing the cancellation, “due to a shooting that occurred [Saturday] evening at the conclusion of the Festival.”
Also on Saturday, this time in Akron, Ohio, a 15-year-old boy was shot in the chest at a Juneteenth celebration that included a local parade and park gathering. The young victim was transported to the local children’s hospital and, according to local media reports, is suffering from “non-life-threatening injuries.”
In San Diego, California, a Saturday night shooting at a Juneteenth celebration left 1 person dead and at least 1 more wounded and the suspect is still at large.
“This appears to be an isolated incident resulting from a dispute here at the event with one person injured and one person, unfortunately, deceased,” reported San Diego PD’s Lt. Adam Sharki to the press.
In Illinois, a large-scale Sunday shooting at a Chicago-area Juneteenth celebration left at least 22 people wounded and 1 dead when police say that an “unknown number of suspects fired multiple rounds from multiple weapons into the crowd,” before fleeing the scene. Police are still searching for those responsible.
In all of these cases, police and corporate media have failed to release racial descriptions of the suspects, whether apprehended or still on the lam, instead opting to obscure their identities and blame the carnage on “gun crime.”
The Juneteenth weekend violence picks up where previous celebrations have left off.
Declared a federal holiday thanks to the demands of violent and murderous Black Lives Matter rioters, Juneteenth, which marks the date of June 19th, 1865 that Union General Gordon Granger invoked Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation in Galveston, Texas, has been plagued by violence each year since its 2021 debut as a federal holiday.
Though Juneteenth is marketed as a holiday celebrating the end of slavery in the United States, the Emancipation Proclamation only applied to the Confederate States in “open rebellion” against the Union when it was issued by 16th President Abraham Lincoln and had little legal standing before the arrival of Union forces and the implementation of martial law, considering that these states had seceded from the Union and were collectively functioning as their own country.
Slaves held in slave-holding Union states, like Kentucky and Delaware, were not freed until the ratification of the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution on December 6th, 1865.