Chicago, IL- Activists rallied in Federal Plaza, June 20, to celebrate Juneteenth and raise demands to defend voting rights and stopping police crimes, including wrongful conviction, police torture, and CPD-ICE collaboration. The National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression had called for a day of action in response to the gutting of the Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court.

Mayor Brandon Johnson made an appearance and asked the crowd, “Are we ready to put an end to racist repression?” He pledged to continue his fight for affordable rents, living wages and to defend public education against politicians putting the interest of corporations over that of the working class.

Johnson continued, “We have to ensure that the voting rights, particularly for Black folks, are protected, because if they undermine voting rights, they undermine labor rights, reproductive rights, civil rights,” he said. The crowd cheered him when he closed his speech, “But we’re not going to allow that in Chicago, are you with me?”

Frank Chapman, NAARPR’s executive director, made it clear in his remarks that the working class can defeat this backwards federal administration, but only through the largest united front possible.

“We are going to exercise our inalienable right to overthrow all institutions, and all government obstacles that stand in the way of our full rights under the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments,” Chapman said.

“We are going to overturn all of those institutions that oppress our people and deny our people the right to vote and the right to exist as equal citizens of this country and equal participants in this democracy. And our people are not a narrow, isolated group – our people are Black, brown, LGBTQ, white and working class.”

Kobi Guillory, a middle school science teacher and executive board member of the Chicago Teacher’s Union, reminded the crowd that the reason slavery ended was because Black people fought back.

“Millions of Black people left the plantation, therefore taking away the labor that the plantation owners relied on, and then took up arms with the union army, and that is what broke the back of the Confederacy,” Guillory said. “And it’s that tradition of struggle that we have to celebrate today.”

Elijah Edwards, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 2858, pointed out in his remarks that there were over 200 slave rebellions during the time of chattel slavery in the United States. “Solidarity existed during slavery, solidarity exists today,” Edwards said. “And only through solidarity will we defeat them.”

Reverend Ciera Bates-Chamberlain, executive director of Live Free Illinois, has organized and led church congregations in the fight against Trump’s deportations. At the rally, she led chants of, “We ain’t free until we’re all free!”

“Juneteenth is more than a celebration,” Bates-Chamberlain said. “Juneteenth is a moment of confrontation. And in that moment of confrontation we are reminding people, declaring, and demanding to set our people free.”

To raise the demand for freedom for the wrongfully convicted, Jasmine Smith of the Campaign to Free Incarcerated Survivors of Police Torture called two different currently incarcerated survivors of wrongful conviction on the phone and held the mic up to her phone to allow them to address the crowd from inside prison.

One of the survivors is Samuel Elam, who was wrongfully convicted for a 2011 home invasion and robbery. Elam recently suffered a heart attack in Menard Correctional, where he has been held for over a decade. Despite receiving specific instructions for care from the doctors at the hospital where he was sent, Elam has been denied consistent medical attention, and his family members who have called into the prison on his behalf have been blocked from contacting him.

“They are violating every right and administrative rule in this correctional facility,” he said, over the phone. “What they’re doing is killing us, and they are killing us slowly. This is not rehabilitation; these are torture chambers.” Smith echoed Elam’s statement about the prisons in Illinois: “I call them slave ships!”

Lara Haddadin from the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR) stated,

“Our struggles have always been interconnected,” she said. “ICE has come for all of us. Whether it’s a Black man being pulled over and put into a head lock by an ICE agent, a Palestinian protester abducted by ICE after speaking out against genocide, or a Latina rapid response member shot at for attempting to document ICE activity.”

Haddadin pointed out that the attempt to overturn birthright citizenship is “part of a coordinated effort to disenfranchise and limit voters of color. It’s an authoritarian power grab. And now Trump's deportation machine is an extension we see clearly of the prison industrial complex that the American economy relies on so heavily today.”

The protest here was organized by the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (CAARPR), with a number of endorsing organizations, including the Arab American Action Network, National Alliance for Filipino Concerns, and Good Kids/Mad City.

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