Rallies and celebrations across America commemorate end of slavery – as it happened

Here’s what’s happened:

• Across the nation, people rallied, celebrated, marched and protested in commemoration of Juneteenth. In Oakland, dockworkers and longshoremen marched with thousands and shut down a port. In Harlem, there was meditation, tap dancing, and singing, in addition to speeches. In Tulsa, hundreds gathered in Greenwood — the site of one of the most horrific acts of racist violence in the US — to remember and celebrate emancipation.
• Tula is also where Donald Trump is holding his first rally since coronavirus closed down the nation. Top members of Trump’s coronavirus task force warned of safety risks of holding a large-scale indoor event, but White House is forging ahead anyway. The Oklahoma Supreme Court blocked a bid to postpone the event due to coronavirus concerns.
• One of the Louisville police officers involved in the death or Breonna Taylor has been fired. Activists are calling for all the officers to be fired and charged in her death. According to the termination later, officer Brett Hankison “displayed an extreme indifference to the value of human life” when he shot Taylor
• Officers chased, shot and killed a security guard at an auto repairs shop in Los Angeles on Thursday. Andres Guardado was 18. On Wednesday, Los Angeles deputies also shot and killed Terron Jammal Boone, 31, who the half brother of Robert Fuller, who [was] discovered hanging from a tree on 10 June.
• Trump threatened “protesters, anarchists, agitators, looters or lowlifes” who attend his rally in Tulsa on Saturday, warning that they will be treated more harshly. He tweeted the threat, even though protest is protected by the First Amendment.

Here are a few more images and videos from around the country.

Los Angeles:

Baltimore:

Seattle:

In Raleigh, North Carolina, it seems demonstrators were successful in toppling the statue atop a 75-foot monument to Confederate soldiers.

The leaders of some cities in North Carolina have voted to remove Confederate monuments amid national protests against police brutality and systematic racism. But a state law passed in 2015, a month after Dylann Roof killed nine Black people at a church in South Carolina, dictates that state-owned monuments can’t be removed without approval from the state’s Historical Commission.

In recent weeks, demonstrators across the country have taken matters into their own hands, pulling down monuments to Confederates and colonizers that state and local governments have left up.

In Philadelphia, Black Lives Matter activists organized a “Jawnteenth”* celebration.

Demonstrators demanded a dismantling of the police department and freedom for political prisoners. Black cowboys joined a gathering West Philadelphia’s Malcolm X park, as did a drum line.

“We’re riding for the cause, Black lives does matter, we love being Black,” Al Lynch, sitting atop a horse named AJB Classic Babe, told WHYY.

*For those who aren’t familiar, here’s an explanation of the uniquely Philadelphian word “jawn”.

In Tulsa, hundreds gathered in Greenwood, Tulsa – the site of one of the most horrific acts of racist violence in US history – to celebrate Juneteenth.

Al Sharpton, who was there to address the crowd, told reporters that “Juneteenth is both a celebration and a reminder, a commemoration. It reminds us that it took almost three years after the signing of the emancipation proclamation for people in Texas to even know that slavery was over.”

“So it is only proper for me to be here to show everyone how far we have come and how far we have yet to go,” he said. “We must understand the litany of pain that Black Americans have suffered.”

The Department of Justice has removed a number of redactions from Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 elections, in response to Freedom of Information Act lawsuits.

The newly uncovered sections of the report suggest that Mueller mulled whether Donald Trump lied. In written responses to Mueller’s questions, Trump said he didn’t remember discussing WikiLeaks with his friend and former campaign adviser Roger Stone. But sources close to Trump recalled conversations in which they discussed the topic.

“It is possible that, by the time the President submitted his written answers two years after the relevant events had occurred, he no longer had clear recollections of his discussions,” the report reads. “But the President’s conduct could also be viewed as reflecting his awareness that [Roger] Stone could provide evidence that would run counter to the President’s denials and would link the President to Stone’s efforts to reach out to WikiLeaks.”

Stone was involved in efforts to contact Wikileaks and obtain Hillary Clinton’s emails and other documents that could to boost Trump’s chances of winning the election.

Are protests a public health risk? Not so much, writes Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute and incoming dean of the Brown University School of Public Health:

As the Covid-19 virus continues to spread unevenly across the world, politicians and opinion pages in the US are already blaming new cases of coronavirus on mass demonstrations against police violence and racism. The protests are a visible example of public crowds, and the ideal scapegoat for problems that are far more complex. Some leaders have treated them with overt hostility. But have protests really played a critical role in spreading new cases of coronavirus? The best science suggests probably not a lot.

Let me be clear: I’m not minimising the risk of mass demonstrations during a pandemic. Indeed, there is almost nothing we do at the moment that doesn’t carry some risk of contagion, and it is undoubtedly true that they will lead to some new cases. But the big question is by how much, and whether there are ways to minimise this risk. Here, the answer is largely in favour of the outdoor protests over other large gatherings planned, such as indoor campaign rallies.

The evidence is becoming clear that wearing a mask can substantially lower the risk of spread and severity of illness. We are seeing more and more masks worn by protesters. A second feature of gatherings that affects the spread of the virus is whether they happen outdoors or indoors. Here, too, research suggests that outdoor activities are much safer than indoor ones.

Finally, although this is more preliminary, evidence suggests that if you’re going to be in a crowd, a mobile one is better than a stationary one. None of these three aspects will protect you from infection definitively – but together they offer a modest level of risk reduction. And compared with the risk of catching Covid-19 that is present in many jobs or other activities, such as working in meat-packing plants, outdoor protests are likely to be much safer– especially if we carry out testing, which can quickly reveal if the virus is spreading among protesters, as Massachusetts has done recently.

The Department of Homeland Security sent helicopters, airplanes and drones to 15 cities where demonstrators were protesting police brutality, and logged at least 270 hours of surveillance, the New York Times reports based on Customs and Border Protection data.

More from the Times:

The department’s dispatching of unmanned aircraft over protests in Minneapolis last month sparked a congressional inquiry and widespread accusations that the federal agency had infringed on the privacy rights of demonstrators.

But that was just one piece of a nationwide operation that deployed resources usually used to patrol the U.S. border for smugglers and illegal crossings. Aircraft filmed demonstrations in Dayton, Ohio; New York City; Buffalo and Philadelphia, among other cities, sending video footage in real time to control centers managed by Air and Marine Operations, a branch of Customs and Border Protection.

The footage was then fed into a digital network managed by the Homeland Security Department, called “Big Pipe,” which can be accessed by other federal agencies and local police departments for use in future investigations, according to senior officials with Air and Marine Operations.

The Associated Press has amended its influential, widely used style guide to capitalize Black.

More from the AP:

The change conveys “an essential and shared sense of history, identity and community among people who identify as Black, including those in the African diaspora and within Africa,” John Daniszewski, AP’s vice president of standards, said in a blog post Friday. “The lowercase black is a color, not a person.”

The news organization will also now capitalize Indigenous in reference to original inhabitants of a place.

In Oakland, thousands rallied with members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), whose workers arranged a strike at 29 ports up and down the West Coast.

I was there, earlier today. The union workers were joined by a motorcycle brigade, a car caravan, a fleet of cyclists, and thousands on foot. Activist and scholar Angela Davis and filmmaker Boots Riley addressed the crowd.

Rather than processing cargo, “including the shirt you’re wearing, the phone you’re carrying” said Sweets Ward, a longshoreman with the ILWU Local 10, workers led the massive march from the Port of Oakland to Oscar Grant Plaza in downtown, unofficially named after the 22-year-old Black man who was killed by police in 2009.

“If I had not chosen to become a university professor my next choice would have been to be a dock worker,” Davis said. “In order to be part of the most radical union in the country.”

“Thank you for shutting down the ports today, on Juneteenth. You represent the potential and power of the labor movement,” she added.

The union had organized similar demonstrations after Grant was killed, more than a decade ago — and many since. “This moment feels a little different,” said Trent Willis, president of the ILWU Local 10. “The response for this call is just astronomical… We have done similar things before, but this is like our last call to action – on steroids.”