Sierra Club Florida Encourages Participation in Six Nineteen Mobilization this Weekend

The white supremacist, tragic murders of Rayshard Brooks, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade and countless others have renewed global demands for justice, and we can't stand by while our governments continue to fund an excessive, brutal and discriminatory system of policing with our tax dollars. 

 

As one of the largest climate and environmental justice advocacy organizations, part of the Sierra Club's mandate is to ensure that oppressed communities receive justice and experience the benefits of a healthy and sustainable future. We can never forget that the roots of the climate crisis lie in racism, land-theft, pillaging, colonialism and patriarchy. And the pain of these injustices is still felt today — Black people have been disproportionately devastated by COVID-19 and live with disproportionately higher levels of toxic pollution, and face more powerful storms, floods, heat waves, wildfires and droughts. This powerful piece by Hop Hopkins, our director of strategic partnerships, in Sierra Magazine details the inextricable connection between the  climate crisis and white supremacy.

 

 

Juneteenth commemorates June 19, 1865 — the day when enslaved people in Texas received word from a Union Army officer that they were free — more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. However, Juneteenth was followed by decades of lynching, mass incarceration, discriminatory housing policies, lack of economic resources, police violence and racial profiling.  While progress has been made in Black America’s 150 years out of bondage, considerable barriers continue to impede that progress.

 

To honor Black lives and to lay a path to freedom for future generations, the Movement for Black Lives is calling for Six Nineteen mobilization this weekend, June 19-21, 2020, where we will make a clear and distinct call to end police violence and to defund police. The Six Nineteen mobilization has three demands: Defund the Police, Invest in Black Communities, Call for Trump’s Resignation. This is a Black-led mobilization, which means that Sierra Club staff and volunteers across the country must take the direction of Black leadership in your community and Sierra Club is taking the direction of Movement for Black Lives nationally because of shared principles, goals and values.