Grand Park, Los Angeles — June 19th, 1851
Hundreds of thousands of people flooded the streets of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento, San Diego, and hundreds of cities across California and across the downtime United States. All of them united towards one purpose, to call for the worldwide abolition of slavery.
The Juneteenth rally had been the brainchild of the California chapters of NAACP, Black Lives Matter, and heavily supported by the ascendant left-wing and liberal activism groups like the Democratic Socialists of America, Courage Campaign, and the SEIU.
Prior to the event, June 19th or "Juneteenth" had been the celebration of the end of slavery, marking the date when word of the Emancipation Proclamation had reached Texas in 1865, now though, Juneteenth had a different meaning. It was a day of action for the worldwide end to slavery.
The biggest surprise though were the downtimers in California, who had taken to the idea with a convert's enthusiasm. It wasn't long before California was printing and shipping boxes upon boxes of signs, stickers, and leaflets to downtime abolitionist groups in preparation for Juneteenth. William Lloyd Garrison heavily promoted the event in his newspaper "The Liberator," Horace Greeley's New York Daily Tribute promoted a Juneteenth march in The Battery.
All across New England, anti-slavery demonstrations had changed the conversation from "no more slave states" to "no slave states."
Within DC itself, anti-slavery demonstrations had turned violent as pro-slavery counter-protesters swarmed and surrounded the abolitionist demonstrators.
Like many other cities, the two sets of demonstrators had been clashing verbally, but the counter-demonstrators had accused the abolitionists of throwing rocks at them, and the pro-slavery crowd had "responded" with violence.
And the nation's newspapers, on both sides of the issue, were there providing every lurid detail of the altercations with photographs and woodcut illustrations.
In many ways, the events on June 19th were a microcosm of how the slavery issue was perceived. Abolitionists would speak out in harsh language, while the pro-slavery factions would respond with violence. In a different timeline, one that has been irrevocably altered by the arrival of California, this contrast would come to be typified by the assault upon Senator Charles Sumner by Preston Brooks.
The veil of respectable politics had been irreversibly torn from the face of the slavery debate.
America had passed the point of no return.
