“Years of looting and coercion prove that 'freedom of other' lacked in the US successive leadership's mindsets,” Iranian Foreign Ministry tweeted on Saturday, with #JUNETEENTH2020, marking the abolition of slavery more than a century and a half ago.
“Under Trump, the horrible reactions to peaceful protests remind the world the very scandalous history. “#JUNETEENTH2020 is a high time to decry the US 'humans new slavery' at home and beyond,” the tweet adds.
Juneteenth, a portmanteau of June and 19th, commemorates the US abolition of slavery under President Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, belatedly announced by a Union army in Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865, after the Civil War ended.
Thousands marched through US cities on Friday in Juneteenth observances, an occasion freighted with special resonance this year amid America’s reckoning with its legacy of racism.
Capping nearly four weeks of protests and national soul-searching aroused by the death of a Black man, George Floyd, under the knee of a white police officer, demonstrators took to the streets from Atlanta to Oakland, California, blending the Juneteenth holiday with calls for racial justice.
MNA