■ … since 2021, a national holiday honoring the day in 1865 when enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, learned they’d been freed …
■ … a holiday in Chicago …
■ … and Illinois …
■ … but not in all states.
■ You might not have the day off had police not killed George Floyd in Minnesota and Breonna Taylor in Kentucky—among others—in 2020.
■ Wary of “an attempt to ‘All Lives Matter’ a day celebrating the end of slavery,” MSNBC’s Hayes Brown fears “little has really changed since 2020’s police brutality protests.” (Photo: Galveston marker, by 2C2K Photography on Flickr.)
■ ProPublica on this date in 2020: Illinois was “a quasi-slave state.”
■ Four years ago today, The Associated Press began capitalizing Black.
Chicago police ‘legitimacy at critical risk.’ Chicago’s inspector general says Mayor Johnson’s pledge to root out cop extremists has “fallen short.”
■ Read the letter, dated April 25—weeks before revelation that the department’s list of organizations officers can’t join didn’t include any racist, far-right groups.
‘A 7-year-old who didn’t have anything to do with whatever is going on over here.’ A neighbor mourns the shooting death of Jai’mani Amir Rivera—struck by an apparently stray bullet yesterday afternoon on Chicago’s Near West Side.
■ Chicago’s police superintendent calls it “random.”
‘The heat is all Joe Biden’s fault because I said so.’ USA Today columnist Rex Huppke mocks the president’s critics: “If I need confirmation of that belief, I’ll go on the internet and find a fellow truth-teller who believes the same thing.”
■ Chicago may have to sweat through this one through Saturday night.
■ The city’s citation of Juneteenth as justification for closing all but one of its cooling centers for the poor and the homeless is, in the words of one state representative, “extremely alarming.”
■ The Lever surveys the environmental impact of artificial intelligence’s ascendance—guzzling water supplies and jacking up consumers’ electricity rates.
■ The Onion: “Man Sleeping On Sidewalk Must Not Know About Heat Advisory.”
■ Jimmy Kimmel: “It’s so hot at Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump asked Melania to be even colder to him.”
‘Biden takes the dare.’ Law professor and former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance says the president’s new executive action on undocumented spouses and kids of U.S. citizens does what “Republicans declined to do in Congress earlier this year and said he could do on his own.”
■ Migrants and volunteers at a Pilsen shelter say a noisemaker installed across the street—apparently to deter outside gatherings—is “terrible.”
Whoops. After word leaked out that Trump planned to spend his nights during the Republican Party’s Milwaukee convention at his Chicago hotel, his campaign says he’s changed his mind.
■ The Daily Beast explains “how Trump’s rich pal is keeping his biopic out of theaters.”
■ The pastor of a Texas megachurch resigning after accusations he sexually abused a woman from the age of 12 was among those on Trump’s evangelical advisory board.
■ Men Yell at Me columnist Lyz Lenz perceives “eugenics by any other name” in Christian nationalism’s push to “outbreed the left.”
And now, Colbert tickets. The digital booth’s open for the Chicago Democratic National Convention editions of The Late Show, Aug. 19-22.
■ Here’s where to join the queue.
Why humanitarian aid can’t get into Gaza. The New York Times explains.
No confidence. Unionized journalists at WBEZ and the Sun-Times have voted overwhelmingly to demand immediate removal of Chicago Public Media CEO Matt Moog.
■ Former Chicago TV news executive Jennifer Schulze: “Fox, Sinclair and the RNC are working together to meddle in the election.”
■ Columnist Anne Helen Petersen mourns: People magazine “should be thriving in 2024,” but instead is grinding out “pretty grim shit.”
Thanks. Mike Weiland, Mike Braden and Sandy Lentz made this edition better.