I’m From East Orange NJ. We call it “The Trenches.” A place where playing sports is the only way of making it out. The Trenches is a place where leadership and guidance are lacking. It’s a place where a bullet can crush pathways to success. Many of our youth won’t live to be old in The Trenches. It’s why it’s so important to say “Be Safe” when parting ways with our peers. “Be safe,” because anything can happen as we go our separate ways —and there’s always a possibility it will be the last time we see each other.

Our Revolution was created out of Senator Bernie Sanders’ Presidential Campaign at the end of the 2016 election. It was created to bring together individuals who wanted to continue advancing progressive policies that Senator Sanders and others had been advocating for during the primaries. Advancing progressive policies nationally meant empowering and educating voters, supporting progressive candidates, and holding politicians accountable, both for their votes and how they’re influenced by corporate spending in politics.

Conscious Black Americans are quite familiar with what living under fascism will feel like.  In practical terms (considering various historical factors) fascism is dictatorship, totalitarianism by another name. Black folk already know what living under totalitarian rule feels like, for we are the American descendants of enslaved Africans. After emancipation, Reconstruction gave us a roughly 10-year glimmer of what participatory democracy could be in this former slave nation. But Reconstruction was betrayed by white men determined to turn back the clock, who ushered in a century-long era of Jim Crow, where lynching, chain gangs, enforced labor, false convictions, imprisonment, de facto and de jure segregation, and other denials of fundamental human and civil rights were once again commonplace throughout America. White dictatorial, totalitarian rule over Black human beings, in law and societal practice, reigned once again. 

On Wednesday, over 200 citizens assembled at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) in Newark for the third public hearing on New Jersey’s Environmental Justice Law (EJ Law). Organized by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP), the hearing addressed the new rule proposals to the EJ Law, passed by Gov. Phil Murphy on Sept. 18, 2020. Patricia Cortado was one of over 45 citizens who testified on the rule proposals. Following is her original statement.

We need to stop deluding ourselves into thinking that gun violence, mass shootings, and domestic terrorism are the result of a rise in mental disorders, depression, or distress among the perpetrators. We need to call out what we are seeing with unflinching clarity: The fundamental cause of the violence we see is White Supremacist-Patriarchal fear of losing the power and privilege ascribed to the psychology, system, and culture of “Whiteness” itself.

Two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation, Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865, with notification of the end of the Civil War and a military edict to end the enslavement of African people in Confederate territory.

June 17, 2022, marks one year since Juneteeth was recognized as a federal holiday in the United States.

The following is the original speech by Racquel Romans-Henry, the Policy Director at Salvation and Social Justice, from the Juneteeth March & Rally for Reparations, Justice & Democracy—co-sponsored by the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice (NJISJ) and the People's Organization for Progress (POP).