Please have a moment of silence for the people who were killed instead of freed when news of emancipation finally reached the furthest corners of the american south.

have another moment for the ledgers, catalogs, and records that were burned and the homes that were destroyed to hide the presence of very much alive and still enslaved people on dozens of plantations and homesteads across the south for decades after emancipation.

and have a third moment for those who were hunted and killed while fleeing the south to find safety across the border, overseas, in the north and to the west.

black people. light a candle, write a note to those who have passed telling them what you have achieved in spite of the racist and intolerant conditions of this world, feel the warmth of the flame under your hand, say a prayer of rememberance if you are religious, place the note under the candle, and then blow it out.

if you have children, sit them down and tell them anything you know about the life of oldest black person you've ever met. it doesn't have to be your own family. tell them what you know about what life was like for us in the days, years, decades after emancipation. if you don't know much, look it up and learn about it together.

This is Juneteenth.

In a shocking revelation during the Spycops public inquiry the police have today (17 June) admitted that they destroyed files relating to the Stop the War Coalition, the National Union of Mineworkers and a number of individuals including leading lawyer Mike Mansfield. The Metropolitan Police Special Demonstration Squad spied on campaigners for decades, and the public inquiry was set up when it was revealed that the SDS spied on the family of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence. It has already heard testimony from victims of police spies, including women activists with whom undercover police officers conducted relationships and fathered children without revealing their true identity. The interim report of the inquiry under Sir John Mitting has reported that the SDS should have been wound up almost as soon as it was established in the 1970s. The new revelation, just released by the inquiry, shows that the Metropolitan police deliberately destroyed secret files before they could be seen by the inquiry. These included reports on the Stop the War Coalition, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the Fire Brigades Union, the National Union of Mineworkers, the building union UCATT, the Jean Charles de Menezes Campaign, as well as former MP Dave Nellist and top KC Mike Mansfield. No one knows how much information was destroyed and so the inquiries contention that most of it will be in other files to which it has access is simply unprovable. Even the Metropolitan Police had to admit to the inquiry that it was a ‘significant failure’ to destroy the files without allowing the inquiry to access them first, and without telling the inquiry that the files were being destroyed.  The inquiry is ongoing and is currently hearing evidence from SDS manager Bob Lambert, who, after his career as a police spy, reinvented himself as an expert on police relations with the  Muslim community.